BATTLES OF DESTINY 

BY Sister M. Fides Shepperson, M. A. 



AUTHOR OF 



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COPYRIGHT 1914 BY 

SISTER M. FIDES SHEPPERSON, M. A. 

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/v 



INTRODUCTION 



This little volume will prove of interest to the general reader 
and of inestimable value to the student or teacher of history. 
It contains graphic descriptions of the seventeen great struggles 
of the historic past — Marathon, Arbela, Zama, Teutobergerwald, 
Adrianople, Chalons, Tours, Senlac-Hastings, Orleans, Lepanto, 
Spanish Armada, Naseby, Blenheim, Pultowa, Saratoga, Valmy, 
and Waterloo. Dates, figures, facts, estimates and reflections 
are presented in attractive form; and the net results of long 
research labor are given in a nutshell. 

Those terrific conflicts of the past seem strangely fascinating 
when looked at in their crucial throes ere yet they are stamped 
with the die of destiny. The thoughtful mind asks, "Would 
our world of today be just what it is if all or if any one of 
these battles had borne results the reverse of what they did bear ? 



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PRESS OF 

THE ALDINE PRINTING COMPANY 

1331-1333-1335 FIFTH AVENUE 

PITTSBURGH, PENNA. 



INDEX TO CHAPTERS 



Chapter 


I. 


Chapter 


II. 


Chapter 


III. 


Chapter 


TV. 


Ch.vpter 


V. 


Chapter 


VI. 


Chapter 


VII. 


Chapter 


VIII. 


Chapter 


IX.- 


Chapter 


X. 


Chapter 


XI.- 


Chapter 


XII.- 


Chapter 


XIII.- 


Chapter 


XIV.- 


Chapter 


XV. 


Chapter 


XVI.- 


Chapter 


XVII. 



page 

-Marathon 7 

-Arbela 13 

-Zama 27 

-Teutoberger Wald 33 

-Adrianople 40 

-Chalons 48 

-Tours 54 

-Hastings-Senlac 63 

-Orleans 81 

-Lepanto 92 

-Spanish Armada 103 

-Naseby 114 

-Blenheim 129 

-Pultowa 134 

-Saratoga 140 

-Valmy 145 

-Waterloo 150 



J. A. KOFFLER, Supervisoi 
FRANK HAMILTON, Lino Machinist 
CHAS. F. MILLER, Compositor 
ROBERT E. LEWIS, Pressman 



Chapter I. 

MARATHON 

As in the order of time, so likewise in the order of importance, 
Marathon stands first among the Battles of Destiny. With- 
out Marathon there would have been no Thermopylae, Salamis, 
Plataea, Mycale; no Attic supremacy; no Age of Pericles: and 
would the world be just what it is to-day if these things had 
not been ? "Would Attica as a Persian satrapy ever have become 
Athens of the Acropolis crowned with the Propylaea-Erectheum- 
Parthenon : Athens bright star-night of the past glittering with 
deathless names? 

Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia had risen and set; Rome 
subsequently rose and fell ; France, Italy, Spain, England, Ger- 
many, and our own infantine experimental Republic of the 
West are advancing fatef ully in the old circle ; yet not one of 
these may boast as many eminent men, stars of first magnitude, 
glorious constellations — as little Greece might boast, that brief 
bright star-night of the past thick-studded with immortal names. 

Callimachus, War Ruler. 

Of the ten commanders of the ten Athenian tribes who as- 
sembled on the heights overlooking the plain of Marathon, five 
voted against battle with the invading Persians, five in favor of 
battle. Callimachus the War Ruler, influenced by the enthus- 
iastic eloquence of Miltiades, gave the casting vote in favor of 
battle. On this so seeming slight chance hung Marathon. 

Humanly speaking, it was madness for that little handful 
of Greeks to rush down upon the countless Persian hosts. The 
Persians themselves could not believe their own eyes when they 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

saw the Greeks running to battle ; and half-heartedly, perhaps 
even jestingly, they prepared for a brief skirmish with madmen. 

The Medes and Persians were at that time deemed invincible. 
Babylonia, Assyria, Asia Minor, the isles of the iEgean, the 
African Coast, the Euxine, Thrace, Macedonia had successively 
fallen before the soldiers of the Great King. The ^gean was a 
Persian Lake ; from east, from south, from north approached 
the awful power of imperial Persia, ready irresistibly to absorb 
little Greece, to punish and obliterate Athens. Already the 
Eretrians, who together wdth the Athenians had aided in the 
Ionian revolt, were overtaken by the dread vengeance of Darius : 
their city had fallen and more than a thousand Eretrians were 
left bound on the island Bgilia awaiting the return of the vic- 
torious Persian fleet from Marathon. Then together with the 
captive Athenians, the Eretrians were to be taken to Susa there 
to await the pleasure of the Great King, wiiose wrath had been 
new-kindled day by day with memories of burning Sardis by 
a court attendant whose sole duty was to repeat to Darius at 
each meal, "Sire, remember the Athenians." Sardis would 
then be fearfully avenged. 

Sardis was, indeed, avenged but not by Marathon. There is 
a justice exact even to the weight of a hair in all things of life ; 
seen or unseen, known or unknown, acknowledged or unacknowl- 
edged, it is ever at work silently, forcefully, fatefully. Athens 
burns Sardis and desecrates the temples of the Persian gods; 
and some years later the Persians sack and devastate Athens^ 
razing her temples to the ground leaving her site in smoking 
ruins. 

"Behold there are Watchers over you, worthy Recorders, 
knowing what you do: and whosoever shall have wrought 
an ant's weight of good shall behold it; and whosoever shall 
have wrought an ant's weight of evil shall behold it." — Koran. 

History tells us that after the battle of Marathon, six thou- 

8 



MARATHON 

sand four hundred Persians lay dead upon the battlefield and 
only one hundred and ninety-two Athenians. This seems in- 
credible, yet it is equally incredible that the Greeks won. Ten 
thousand Athenians and one thousand Platgeans had fought 
against one hundred thousand soldiers of the Great King, and — 
won. There was something wrong with that motley army of 
the Great King; some subtly retributive force was at work, 
some balancing Justice. 

MiLTIADES. 

Doubtless to Miltiades more than to any other man Athens 
and the world owes Marathon. It was his overpowering elo- 
quence that weighed heavily in the balance against the honest 
fears of those who dreaded the encounter with Persia's hitherto 
invincible warriors; the well founded fears of those who were 
secretly in sympathy with Hippias and hoped that a battle 
might be averted : and rhe prudent fears of those who dreaded 
defeat and the vengeance of the Great King and thought it 
wiser to wait until the promised help should come from Sparta. 
One man's eloquent fearlessness outweighed all those fearful 
considerations and precipitated the mad descent from the hill, 
the onslaught, the unequal fight, the wonder-victory. 

Yet had Miltiades rested after the momentous battle all 
might have been lost. For the sullen Persian fleet hastening 
from Marathon had turned its course towards undefended 
Athens. And so that very night, even with the departure of the 
last Persian ship from the shore, Miltiades led his battle torn 
veterans a distance of about twenty-two miles to Phalerum, the 
port nearest to Athens. And early the next morning when, in- 
deed, true to Miltiades' fears, the Persian fleet appeared off the 
coast of Phalerum, the men of Marathon stood awaiting their 
landing. They did not land. 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

Hippias, deposed tyrant of Athens, and guide and leader of 
the Persians was killed at Marathon. Callimachus, the pole- 
march, was killed, not in the battle proper, but on the shore as 
the defeated forces were confusedly seeking safety in escape to 
their ships, and the Greeks, following them even to the water's 
edge, kept up the slaughter. 

Surely Miltiades remained ever after the best beloved hero 
of Athens, and his years passed on amid ever vernal honors 
down the easy ways of old age, and the end was in peace! 

But, alas! history tells us that Miltiades fell into disgrace, 
was banished from Athens, and a few years after Marathon, died 
of his wounds in prison. 

Too bad that every crest-wave of human achievement hastily 
tumbles to a depression correspondingly low as the swell was high. 
Scipio, conqueror at Zama, triumph-crowned, and honored with 
the appellation Africanus, was, on that same day one year later 
on trial for his life. What a tumult of conflicting feelings must 
have raged in his heart when, disdaining to repl}^ to the ac- 
cusations made against him, Scipio said, turning to the fickle 
populace, "I would remind the men of Rome that this day one 
year ago I won the battle of Zama. ' ' And then the tide turned 
in his favor and the young-world children wept because of their 
ingratitude, and clamorously acquitted Scipio. But depressive 
doubt succeeded crest confidence and Scipio went into exile. 
Ingrata Patria! (Ungrateful Native Land!) Scipio exclaimed, as 
death drew near and his tired eyes turned longingly towards 
Rome. 

Coriolanus, Roman exile, torn to pieces by the Volscians; 
Hannibal, lone boast of Carthage, hater of Rome ; Themistocles, 
hero of Salamis; Aristides the Just; Socrates; Miltiades are 
among the tragic figures on the historic stage whose dying heart- 
throbs may have reproachfully re-echoed Ingrata Patria. 

10 



MARATHON 
All the Glory That Was Greece. 

From Marathon (490 B. C.) clarion of the birth of Athens, 
to ^gospotami (405 B. C.) her knell of death, momentous history- 
was made. 

^gospotami knelled the fall of Athens ; Leuctra, of Sparta ; 
Mantinea, of Epaminondas-Thebes ; and Chaeronea, of all Hellas ; 
but not all of Athens died at ^gospotami. Pericles, Aspasia, 
Phidias, Ictinus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, .^schylus, Sophocles, 
Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon — 
have not died; they are effective forces in the world today. 

Spartan military excellence. Spartan hardihood and endur- 
ance is a bubble that burst ; it is no more : but Attic excellence 
of intellect endures imperishably — with Platonic wonder as 
freshly fair in college halls today as in the Academia and Ly- 
ceum of the old Athenian day. Mind is the only Conqueror. 

Blue sky of Athens, white cliff Acropolis, — so unchanging 
amid change, so laughing fair among the ruins of the glory that 
was Greece ! 

Nature's ever young irreverence towards the wreck of time is 
invigorating. It calls to the heart of man in language the 
heart understands. What's Time! 

"IMen said, 'But time escapes 

Live now or never.' 
"He said, 'What's time! Leave Now for dogs and apes — 

Man has Forever.' " 

—Browning. 

Sparta. 

The manner in whicii the news of the defeat of the Athen- 
ians at ^gospotami affected Athens is in striking contrast with 
the manner in which Sparta received word of the disastrous 

U 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

Spartan defeat at Levictra. When report of the naval disaster 
reached the Piraeus, it was quickly communicated to the throng- 
ing crowds within the Long Walls, and thence to the heart of 
the city. Consternation prevailed and all Athens mourned. 
"That night," says Xenophon, "no one in Athens slept." 

The news of the defeat at Leuetra reached Sparta in the 
midst of a festive celebration. The magistrates heard of the 
defeat, and the death of their king with countenances unmoved; 
they gave orders that the festival be uninterrupted; and they 
urged all w^ho had lost relatives and friends in the battle of 
Leuetra to appear at the festivities in particularly gay attire 
and with smiling faces, while those whose relatives were among 
the survivors were ordered to put on mourning. 

The spirit of Lycurgus, of Draco, and of Leonidas seems to 
have fused and chilled into the Laws of Sparta. No surrender; 
conquer or die ; return wdth your shield or upon it ; wounds all 
in front and faces grimly fierce even in death — such was the 
spirit of Sparta. 

Whatever may be our admiration for the Spartan qualities 
in general, there can be but lament that they found expression 
in the Peloponessian War. This fractricidal strife brought ruin 
to Hellas. Marathon, Thermopylas, Salamis, Plataea, Mycale 
were all undone by Syracuse and ^gospotami. Charonea was 
made possible and the passing of the scepter of empire from 
Greece to Macedonia, from leaderless Hellas to Alexander the 
Great. 



12 



Chapter II. 

ARBELA 

The life of Alexander the Great is of perennial interest, for 
it holds in epitome the life of the world when the world was 
young. Plutarch tells with quaint truthfulness what cannot 
now be told without a smile of wondering incredulity. 

Alexander spent the night before the battle of Arbela in 
consultation with the diviner Aristander, and in sacrificing to the 
god Fear. What does that mean ? The conqueror of the world 
would placate Fear; would render it favorable to him, adverse 
to the enemy. Terror, recoil from death, panic-madness of a 
multitude of men, rout, ruin — from that deliver my army, 
great god Fear; but let it come upon my enemy. Thus prayed 
Alexander as his gaze rested upon the moving plain gleaming 
with a million torch-lights where Darius, prepared for a night 
attack, was reviewing his forces. And well might Alexander 
so pray. Fear that blanches the lips and freezes the blood in 
the heart, contagious Terror irresistible, dread recoil from 
butchering death — these were, indeed, effects of causes propor- 
tionately terrible. A million men were in the enemy's ranks, 
three hundred chariots armed with scythes; rivers were in the 
rear, and beyond a hostile country. 

"Alexander," says Napoleon, "deserves the glory which he 
has enjoyed for so many centuries and among all nations; but 
what if he had been beaten at Arbela, having the Euphrates, 
the Tigris, and the deserts in his rear, without any strong 
places of refuge, nine hundred leagues from Macedonia!" 

After the sacrifice to the god Fear, as Plutarch gravely as- 
sures us, Alexander seemed jubilant in spirit, and returning to 

13 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

his tent, made ready to take his rest. Parmenio, his oldest and 
ablest general, sought him there and suggested that a night 
attack be made, urging that their army would grow faint at 
heart could they see as in broad daylight the countless hosts 
arrayed against them. In conclusion Parmenio respectfully 
said, "And if I were Alexander I would attack the Persians 
tonight." 

To this Alexander ironically replied "And so would I if I 
were Parmenio." On further remonstrance being made Alex- 
ander curtly replied, "I will not steal a victory." At this 
Parmenio withdrew and Alexander lay down to rest. 

A profound and most refreshing sleep came to Alexander. 
Morning dawned and it seemed proper to rouse the men to 
breakfast and to preparation for battle, but Alexander still 
slept. In the words of Plutarch : ' ' But at last, time not giving 
them leave to wait any longer, Parmenio went to his bedside and 
called him twice or thrice by his name, till he waked him, and 
then asked how it was possible, when he was to fight the most 
important battle of all, he could sleep so soundly as if he were 
already victorious. 'And are we not so, indeed,' replied Alex- 
ander smiling, 'since we are at last relieved from the trouble of 
wand^ering in pursuit of Darius thro' a wide and wasted coun- 
iry, hoping in vain, that he would fight us?' And not only 
before the battle, but in the height of the danger, he showed 
himself great, and manifested the self-possession of a just fore- 
sight and confidence. ' ' 

Alexander's full front battle line was not so long as Darius' 
center. And this so seeming fatal arrangement yet turned out 
to be most favorable for Alexander. For instead of attacking 
the Persian center where Darius commanded in person and 
where the ground in front had been smoothed and prepared for 
the rush of the three hundred scythe-chariots, Alexander at- 
tacked vigoriously the left wing driving them in front of and 

14 



ARBELA 

towards the center. The onslaught of the Macedonian phalanx 
was irresistible and the Persian army, dominated by the god 
Fear, was in panic rout before Darius could get his unwieldy 
forces full into action or send forth the chariots upon which he 
so much relied. 

Alexander pursued the fleeing enemy until urged back by 
messengers from Parmenio saying his wing was surrounded by 
the Persians. Alexander reluctantly returned and full victory 
for the Macedonian army was soon proclaimed upon the field. 

Darius, seeing that all was lost and that his chariot, wedged 
in among dead bodies high as the shoulders of the horses, was 
unable either to advance or to turn back, hastily leaped from his 
seat and seizing a riderless mare, he galloped as best he could 
over the bodies of the dying and the dead and thus escaped from 
the battlefield. 

The break in the friendship between Alexander and his ablest 
general, Parmenio, began with the battle of Arbela. Was there 
jealousy, cruel as the grave, in the heart of the older man as he 
saw success after success crown the brow of the young com- 
mander? Granicus, Issus, Arbela — Europe, Asia, Africa, the 
world — had gone down successively under the Conqueror. 
Jealously is incipient hate. 

"He who ascends to mountain heights will find 
The loftiest peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow; 
Pie who would conquer or subdue mankind, 
Must look down on the hate of those below." 



-Byron. 



Human, Too Human. 



All that the literatures of the world hold treasured in amber; 
all that life, the primal fount of literature, holds as its human 
heritage — find fitting application to Alexander the Great. The 
color scale — from white thro' tints to standard, and from 

15 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

standard thro ' shades to black — of every emotion and passion of 
the heart of man is fixed fadelessly npon the name and fame of 
Alexander. 

Yet how human and dearly human it all is ! We understand 
it today even as Callisthenes understood it, and as the age B. C. 
and the early age and the middle age understood it. We haven't 
advanced even yet very far from the primitive. The heart that 
in drunken rage slew Clitus his friend, and then mourned his 
deed inconsolable in his tent for three days — is easily cognizable 
today. 

That quarrel between Alexander and his tried and true 
Macedonians, with its subsequent reconciliation, has in it a ring 
of the old young-world. For when Alexander returned to Susa 
with his worn out troops, he at once sought out the thirty thou- 
sand boys whom he had left there in training. Great was his de- 
light at the progress they had made in his absence ; at their mili- 
tary bearing, their ability to ride and hurl the javelin, and to 
perform other adroit manoeuvres. Alexander then thought to 
reorganize his army and send home all the Macedonians who 
were in any way disabled, or who, when urged to cross over the 
Ganges, had begged to be taken back to their wives and children. 
But the sturdy veterans were sorely offended at this proposal, 
and breaking out into a rage, declared that they had been most 
unjustly dealt with, and that every Macedonian would at once 
abandon the army, and that, perhaps, with his pretty boys he 
might be able to keep the world which their good swords had 
won for him. To this Alexander responded in deep wrath that 
it should be as they said. He at once dismissed from his service 
all the Macedonians and filled their places with Persians. 

Now when the Macedonians saw that it was done even as they 
had said, the scales of jealous anger dropped from their eyes 
and they were deeply repentant. So laying aside their arms, and 
dressed only in short undergarments they sought suppliantly 

16 



ARBELA 

the tent of Alexander. But it opened not to their importunities. 
For three days they stayed there neither eating nor drinking, 
but sorely longing for the light of the countenance of Alexander, 
for every man loved him. And at last the tent door opened and 
Alexander came forth, and going affectionately among them he 
sat down and wept; and they wept. 

Then Alexander, thinking it wiser that the maimed should 
embark in the waiting vessels, spoke to them most kindly, prais- 
ing their valor and declaring that their deeds should be known 
throughout the world: saying also that he would write con- 
cerning them to his mother Olympias and to the Governor of 
Macedonia giving orders that the first seats in the theatres 
should be reserved for them and that they should therein be 
crowned with chaplets of flowers. Moreover every soldier's pay 
should continue to him, and the pay due to the fallen should be 
regularly sent to their wives and children. And thus was rec- 
onciliation between Alexander and his Macedonians happily 
effected. 

How childish it all is — that jealous hate and the hasty re- 
action; the humiliating importunities of barbaric love; the Con- 
queror conquered and — in tears; the generous re-fusion of the 
old warm feelings ; the magnanimity of the Great ; the joyous de- 
parture of the honored veterans, their sitting in the seats of 
honor crowned with a chaplet of flowers: childish? well, yes, 
but we older children can understand and even dimly — remem- 
ber. 

A Deity. 

Did Alexander believe himself descended from Jupiter Am- 
mon ? No. On one occasion being wounded he said * * This, my 
friends, is real blood flowing not Ichor, 

"Such as immortal gods are wont to shed." 

Yet if the reply of the gymnosophist be admitted as true, 

17 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

Alexander was not a mortal. The Gymnosophists, or wise men 
of India, were entertained at the court of Alexander, and among 
the questions proposed to them by the young lord of the world 
was, how a man might become a god : to this the sage replied 
"By doing that which was impossible for men to do." The 
deeds done by Alexander in his brief thirty-two years seem be- 
yond the merely human : and it is certain that he was honored 
as a deity in the latter years of his life. He had his friend and 
biographer, Callisthenes, tortured and put to death because he 
had derisively laughed while the servile court prostrated before 
the "present Deity", and had refused to follow their example. 

"Man, vain man dressed in a little brief authority does cut 
such capers before high heaven as make the angels mourn. ' ' The 
awful punishments inflicted upon Thebes, Tyre, Gaza ; the man- 
iacal madness that satiated itself in the life blood of Clitus — a 
warrior, comrade, and friend, a soldier who at Granicus had 
thrust his own body between Alexander and the down-plunging 
slaughtering sword and so receiving in his own flesh the blow, 
had saved the life of the man who should later slay him; the 
deadly ingratitude which could forget the lifelong services of 
Parmenio, his father's ablest general, his own boyhood's adviser, 
admirer, and friend, and, in a fit of jealous rage, condemn to 
death Philotas, son of Parmenio, and Parmenio ; the hate-exulta- 
tion which, triumphant at last, had the feet of Batis, late satrap 
of Gaza and a bravely fallen foe, bored thro' and thereby tied 
to his chariot; then Alexander, descendant of Achilles, drove 
three times thro ' the streets of Gaza, dragging his living victim 
— naked, torn, bleeding, broken, dying— thro' the town in which 
so late he has reigned as Persian satrap : surely at capers such 
as these well might the angels mourn. 

Yet these atrocities are well nigh balanced by acts of heroism, 
repentant generosity, benignity, magnanimity : and it is an open 
question whether any other of the race of mortals, having the 

18 



ARBELA 

world of his time absolutely in his own hands, would have acted 
as wisely as Alexander. 

The eunuch escaping from the Macedonian camp and bearing 
to Darius the news of his wife Statira's death, extolled the for- 
bearance and chivalrous courtesy of Alexander toward the Per- 
sian captives and admiringly cried out "Alexander is as gentle 
after victory as he is terrible on the field." And Darius, so 
late King of Persia, tallest and handsomest man of his time, 
husband of Statira, most bewitchingly beautiful woman of Asia ; 
but now alas! an uncrowned king, loser of Arbela, a fugutive, 
bereft of sons, daughters, wife — nevertheless on hearing of Alex- 
ander 's generous conduct towards the royal captives exclaimed 
in tears, "Ye gods of my family, and of my kingdom, if it be 
possible, I beseech you to restore the declining affairs of Persia, 
that I may leave them in as flourishing a condition as I found 
them, and have it in my power to make a grateful return to 
Alexander for the kindness which in my adversity he had shown 
to those who are dearest to me. But if, indeed, the fatal time 
be come, which is to give a period to the Persian monarchy, if 
our ruin be a debt which must be paid to the divine jealousy, 
and the vicissitude of things, then, I beseech you, grant that no 
man but Alexander may sit upon the throne of Cyrus." And 
when slowly bleeding to death from wounds inflicted by his base 
betrayer, Bessus, satrap of a province into which Darius had 
fled for safety — the dying monarch begged of Polystratus, a 
chance attendant, for a little water : and on receiving it he said 
that it had become the last extremity of his ill fortune to re- 
ceive benefits and not be able to return them. * ' But Alexander, ' ' 
said he, "whose kindness to my mother, my wife and my chil- 
dren I hope the gods will recompense, will doubtless thank you 
for your humanity to me. Tell him, therefore, in token of my 
acknowledgment, I give him this right hand," with these words 
he took hold of Polystratus' hand and died. 

The man who could inspire such sentiments of grateful ad- 

19 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

miration into the heart of his dying enemy was more than 
mortal. 

Plutarch tells us that Alexander, coming up at that mo- 
ment, gazed with painful emotion upon the dead form of Dar- 
ius. And taking the cloak from off his own shoulders he covered 
with it the prostrate form of his late foe, and gazing down upon 
the fierce dead comely face — he wept. 

Philosophies. 

All the philosophies of the sleepy East and their antitheses 
of the aggressive West seem to have receptively influenced the 
myriad-minded Alexander. 

Pride, not vanity, but pride essentially one with the chords 
of being, expressed itself in the words "And were I not Alex- 
ander I would be Diogenes." Either highest or lowest, all or 
nothing. Earth as kingdom or — a tub; no compromise, no half 
way, absolutely and unconditionally either one extreme or the 
other: this seeming perversity in the makeup of many men of 
genius has not been sufficiently considered; it is not psychologi- 
cally understood; there is something humanly attractive about 
it; something young- world young and something old, old as the 
heart of man. And this perverse pride was the common link 
between Alexander and Diogenes, and by it each understood 
the other : to the former, indeed, fate awarded the earth-kingdom 
and to the latter — the tub ; but these extremes were, by the com- 
mon link, essentially one. 

The Gymnosophists, or wise men of India, whom Alexander 
consulted, could not have deeply impressed the mind of the 
pupil of Aristotle, for, as Plutarch tells us, he laughed at them 
and sent them away with many presents. 

Yet the sacrificial death of Calanus, one of these seers, could 

20 



ARBELA 

not fail to affect forcibly the susceptible mind of Alexander, 
Jests, dreams, auspices, oracles, theories, sophisms, philosophies, 
metaphysical speculations in general — well, these are agreeably 
adjustable; maybe so maybe not so; and when looked at 
too logically they can all scamper away and hide themselves 
elusively in Symbolism: but death, death in flames, self-sought, 
self-devised, self-suffered — that is real, that is awful. 

On the day of his death and whilst erecting his funeral pile 
Calanus talked cheerfully with the Macedonians and urged them 
to drink deep and enjoy the passing hours. He commended 
himself to Alexander, whom, he said, he doubted not but that 
he should soon see again at Babylon. Then when the pyre was 
finished, he set it on fire, sprinkled himself, and cutting off some 
of his hair, threw it into the flame as a first-offering of the 
sacrifice: he then mounted the pyre, lay down calmly and cov- 
ered his head in his robe. He moved not as the crackling flames 
drew near, nor might any one note the least tremor of fear in 
his limbs as the fire fed on them, nor did any sigh or moan es- 
cape from his lips: tho' what contortions of agony may have 
twisted themselves on his face could not be known for his head 
and shoulders were hid in his robe. 

Alexander stood by and watched the scene. At first he 
thought to interpose, but learning that such was the custom of 
the country, and that the seer, by this sacrificial death, drew 
to himself high honor and special veneration from the people, 
he forbore. Alexander's brow was clouded as he watched the 
full-fed flames: in his mind re-echoed the threefold question of 
the Indian seer Whence are we come; whereby do we live; 
whither do we gol Ah, whither! in his heart ten thousand re- 
criminative contradictory questionings seethed voiceless, answer- 
less. Alexander turned dejectedly away and retired within his 
tent. 

That night violent reaction from the depression of the day 

21 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

seized upon Alexander. He ordered that all his army should rest 
and feast. Carpe diem was the dominating animus of the en- 
suing debauch. In a delirium of drunken joy Alexander pro- 
posed a drinking bout offering a crown to the victor. Promachus 
drank twelve quarts of wine and to him was awarded the prize. 
But Promachus did not live long to enjoy his reward, three days 
after he died from the effects of the debauch as did forty others 
who had taken part in the drinking bout at the great court feast. 

There is undoubtedly a strong tendency in human nature to 
rush from one extreme to the other. The best by corruption be- 
come the worst; no one can fall so low as he who has been 
highest. But from the lowest which has known the highest there 
rush at times instantaneous recoil, re-ascent, re-attainment — 
momentary tho' it be — to the highest. Then when genius gilds 
that lowest, that recoil, re-ascent, re-attainment — the thought- 
less world is thrilled, it listens anew, it understands. 

Some of the chastest lyrics of the language have been written 
in recoil from, in liberation and glad bird freedom from the 
slough of sensuality. 

The significant charm of Francis Thompson 's Hound of Heav- 
en lies in what it connotes rather than in what it tells. Soul- 
struggle is enmeshed in the lines, and defeat is heard in alto 
moan with every note cf victory. It is the violent rebound to 
the height gilded, perhaps goldened, by genius. 

Alexander's Feast. 

The ode Alexander's Feast by Dryden is one of many contri- 
butions to literature inspired by the Macedonian Madman. 

"Great genius is to madness near allied 
And thin partitions do their bounds divide." 

— Dryden. 

Perhaps the taking of Persepolis and the mad orgy of tri- 
umph there indulged in, mark the flood-tide of Alexander's good 



ARBELA 

fortune and likewise the fateful turning and re-flow of the tide. 
But what a tide! 

Given the effects of generous wine ; and the warrior, the mili- 
tary genius, the poet-philosopher, the dreamer of dreams, the 
world conqueror, the fair-haired favorite of Zeus, is, indeed, in 
that wondrous triumph-hour — a deity. That sycophant court- 
adulation, that lulling love, that music, that wine might well 
* * raise a mortal to the skies or draw an angel down. ' ' music, 
elf of a lost paradise, we remember with you, we lament, we love, 
we pity, we deplore, we — weep. With young- world Alexander 
touched to tears by old Timotheus' lyre, we too lament a bravely 
fallen foe: 

"He sang Darius great and good 
By too severe a fate 
Fallen, fallen, fallen. 
Fallen from hh high estate, 
And weltering in his blood." 

We too deplore human ingratitude: 

"Deserted in his utmost need 
By one his former bounty fed — 
On the bare earth exposed he lies 
With not a friend to close his dying eyes." 

We too muse mournfully perplexed o 'er all this sorry scheme 
of things and mingle our tears with those which thus perplexedly 
flowed so long ago: 

"With downcast looks the joyless victor sate. 
Revolving in his altered soul 
The various turns of chance below; 
And, now and then, a sigh he stole 
And tears began to flow." 

Lyre of old Timotheus, wizard violin, symphony concert — 
for the hour at least, we are what you make us, and whither you 
lead we follow. Sadness, remorseful sorrow-love, youth and 
beauty caught coiled in icy death — are these, as Poe asserts, the 

23 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

essential elements of supreme beauty? Poe's magically beauti- 
ful Lenore, Raven, Ullalume, Annabel Lee confirm the poet- 
critic's dictum. Love in sorrow, beauty in death, mutability, 
vicissitude are the dominant chords in music, in literature, and 
in life. 

But reaction follows depression, and violent activity suc- 
ceeds to passivity. And this the old musician knew who play- 
ed so well upon the all too humanly receptive heart of Alex- 
ander. The wail of the Grecian ghosts "that in battle were 
slain and unburied remain inglorious on the plain" call for 
vengeance and point out the abodes of the Persian gods. 

Thais leads the way, and Alexander, drunk with wine and 
with the madness of music, follows whither she leads him ; and 
soon the temples of the gods, the palaces of the Persian kings, 
the city Persepolis — are in crackling flame. 

Suddenly Alexander is again Alexander. With shame of soul 
he sees the ruin he has wrought and frantically strives to un- 
do what he has done. But too late ; countermands clash with 
commands, confusion feeds the flame, Persepolis falls. 

Thus culminated the triumph-banquet held in honor of Alex- 
ander 's conquest of Asia and immortally sung into song by 
John Dryden in one of the best odes of the English language, 
Alexander's Feast. 

Hellenism. 

Alexander died in a comparatively short time after the bat- 
tle of Arbela and his world empire fell to pieces. What, then, 
was the permanent good or decisive effect of his conquests? 
To this question historians reply that the Hellenization of the 
Orient with subsequent spread of Greek culture among the 
Arabian Saracens, thence as vital principle re-animating the 
Rennaissance — was the result of Alexander's conquest of Asia. 

24 



ARBELA 

More than seventy Greek colonies were established along the 
route of the Conqueror. These continued to flourish long after 
the far seeing mind that planned them had ceased to foresee 
and plan. Vigorous Hellenism was easily dominant over sleepy 
Orientalism. And thus was bloodlessly won thro' the slow 
centuries, the great victory of freedom, civilization, culture, art, 
science, philosophy — Hellenism. From Arbela (B. C. 331) to 
the sixteenth century Rennaissance is a conquering span that 
might well delight the gaze of the young warrior who once 
wept because there were no more worlds for him to conquer. 
As Napoleon's crucial defeat was not at Waterloo but in 
Moscow ; as the British Revolutionary forces lost the colonies not 
at Yorktown but at Saratoga; as Carthage of old went down 
under world conquering Rome not at Zama, but at the Metaurus ; 
so the incipient death blow to Alexander was inflicted not in 
Babylon but at the banks of the Ganges. When his army re- 
fused to follow him any farther; when his brave Macedonians 
wept for their far away homes and begged to be taken back to 
their wives and children; when his best friends and admirers 
saw in the wide rolling Ganges and the enemy bristling the op- 
posite bank, obstacles insuperable even to Alexander; when at 
last the Conqueror turned away unconquering, turned back, 
yielded — then came the fierce chagrin-humiliation, the mad be- 
ginning of the end. The world marks only the collapse-crash, 
but deeper insight sees sympathetically the fatal bend or twist 
or crack or break havjng in it inevitably the tragic collapse- 
crash. 

The death of Alexander has been variously described. Some 
say he died of poison; others, of the exceeding coldness of the 
waters of the river in which he bathed ; others, that his death is 
directly attributable to the excesses, the mad orgies of sensual 
indulgence into which he plunged himself as result of his 
chagrin at turning back from the Ganges, and of his wild grief 



25 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

at the untimely death of Hephaeston his favorite and friend. 
Doubtless the subjectivities of the various biographers have ob- 
truded themselves over the objective reality and the simple 
truth will never be known. Alexander died at Babylon, 323 
B. C, aged thirty-two. 



26 



Chapter III. 

ZAMA 

Had the battle of Zama been won by the Carthaginians and 
lost by the Romans, then Semitic influence rather than Aryan, 
would have moulded the civilization of Europe. These two 
mutually antagonistic races have grappled together in mortal 
combat at Zama, Tours, Jerusalem and, influentially, at Bel- 
grade, Lepanto, Constantinople, Adrianople — and the end is not 
yet. Will there ever be full amity between these races ? 

But Rome won at Zama. And as Roman historians gravely 
assure us that it was better for all subsequent civilization that 
Rome should win, why we gratefully acquiesce; feeling, indeed, 
dully content that fate should, at all past times and crises, have 
shown herself as wisely beneficent to the winning cause as she is 
today. But however superior Rome may have been to Carthage, 
and however Roman valor, Roman dogged endurance, Roman in- 
tegrity, {Romana Fides) may have surpassed Carthaginian — 
yet Hannibal, favorite of Baal, towered mountain-high over all 
Romans of his day, and for a time, even over all Rome. 

Hannibal's personality thrills thro' the centuries. The school- 
boy with the good wonder-flush of admiration at the revealing 
vistas of the past, understands Hannibal. That eternal enmity 
to Rome in the son of Hamilcar ; that youthful vow at the altar 
of Baal and its life and death fulfilment; that Herculean cross- 
ing of the Alps; Ticino, Trebia, Thrasymenus, Cannae — Capua; 
Metaurus, Zama : exile, suicide — why the school-boy understands 
it all : and Hannibal, hunted victim of the past, is victor of the 
passing hour. Glamour of the historic page, generous youth, 
poets in prose, dreamers of dreams — and the Smoky City class- 

27 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

room is all aglow with white-light from the Alps as Hannibal 
crosses; with red light from the bloody waters of Lake Thrasy- 
menus ; with gold-glow from the rings severed from the cold dead 
hands of Roman knights at dread Cannge; with mocking death- 
light as Hannibal defiantly dies! 

Capua. 

And after the great victory at Cannge Hannibal led his troops 
into winter quarters at Capua. Here his soldiers, relaxed from 
the severe discipline of war and wildly delighting in the genial 
climate of southern Italy, gave themselves up unrestrainedly to 
luxuries and pleasures. And just here at Capua, in the midst 
of those luxuries and pleasures, lay potentially the defeat at 
Zama. 

For the Romans, gaining courage from despair, grimly faced 
the fatal losses of Cannge, and never were the Roman people 
more royally Roman than when they voted thanks to the consul, 
Terrentius Varro the runaway loser of Cannae, — "because he 
had not despaired concerning the Republic" (quod de repuMica 
non desperasset) . Every day spent by Hannibal and his army 
at Capua trebly weakened his fighting force and cause as it 
trebly strengthened the fighting force and cause of the Ro- 
mans. Capua lost Metaurus, Zama, Carthage, and Semitic 
dominance in Europe. Ave Capua! 

Defeat. 

The Roman senate determined to carry the war into the 
enemy's country hoping that thereby Carthage would be con- 
strained to summon Hannibal and his army from Rome in order 
to defend the Carthaginian capital. Nor was this hope vain. 
Hannibal's eight years' success in Italy was negatived by this 
call from Carthage and his reluctant compliance. 

28 



ZAMA 

Rome's ablest general, Seipio, with a well equipped army 
awaited Hannibal on his disheartened return into Africa. They 
met at Zama. 

History or story relates that a personal interview between 
Seipio and Hannibal took place before the battle. Each stood in 
awe and admiration of the other: each felt mutually the charm 
of bravery, integrity, excellence ; as meia they were friends, as 
leaders of hostile armies, they were enemies. The interview 
proved futile. After a proudly lingering farewell they parted 
with dignity; and riding back to their respective armies pre- 
pared for immediate battle. 

When the fight was fiercest and success seemed to favor the 
Carthaginians, suddenly the sun ceased to shine and darkness 
enveloped the contending hosts. It was an eclipse of the sun for 
which the Romans were, in great measure, prepared; the 
Carthaginians, wholly unprepared. Panic fear and superstitious 
terror siezed upon Hannibal's veterans; they who had crossed 
the Alps, and stood knee deep in blood at Lake Trasymene and 
at Cannae, yet quailed in this midday darkness. 

With the slow and ghastly return of the light of the sun, 
Rome's bull-dogs were again ferociously at slaughter; but the 
Semitic heart had been smitten with awe of the unknown God; 
he would pray, not fight; he would fall prone in adoration of 
the awful Deity of darkness and of light. In vain did Hannibal 
strive to rouse his terror-stricken legions, in vain did he himself 
perform prodigies of valor: the hour of conquering Rome had 
come and on her way to world-conquest lay Zama. The Jugger- 
naut of destiny rolled on, and Zama-Carthage fell to rise no 
more. 

And After. 

"It is not in the storm or in the strife 
We feel benumbed and wish to be no more; 
But in the after silence on the shore — 
When all is lost except a little life." — Byron. 

29 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

Hannibal was only forty-five when he lost Zama. That flame 
of hatred toward Rome, kindled at the altar of Baal when he 
was a boy of only nine years, still raged within him inextinguish- 
ably. He had lost his right eye in the Roman campaign. His 
brave brothers, Mago, hero of Trebia, and Hasdrubal, hero of 
Metaurus, had fallen in battle. The second Punic War, the 
war of Rome against Hannibal, or rather of Hannibal against 
Rome, had after phenomenal successes, ended in the disastrous 
defeat at Zama and in the most humiliating conditions of peace 
imposed upon Carthage by world-conquering Rome. All, indeed, 
seemed lost except a little life; yet in this dull defeat-peace, 
this wearily sullen after-storm, the old hate fires insatiably 
raged. 

Hannibal, unsupported and unappreciated by his own coun- 
try passed over into Asia. He wandered from Asiatic court to 
court ever striving to arouse enmity towards Rome or to incite 
the nations to battle against her. Rome steadily pursued her 
inveterate foe. From court to court he passed, and from coun- 
try to country passed too, the paid assassins whose sole object 
in life was to bring Hannibal dead or alive to Rome. 

And at the court of Prusias, king of Bythinia, Hannibal was 
at last hopelessly trapped. Hatefully grinning faces glared 
in upon him from corridors, doors, windows: Rome had won. 

Hannibal's presence of mind and proud dignity did not de- 
sert him even in that crucial hour, even when he toyed with 
death. Whilst adjusting his military robes in full presence 
of the leering faces at corridors, doors, and windows, he took 
from his finger a ring whose hollow setting contained a most 
potent poison. This he drank. And before any one of that self- 
gratulating victor-gang realized what was taking place, Han- 
nibal fell forward dead 

The Catholic Church condemns suicide. The divine command 
Thou shalt not kill has as its complete predicate either thyself or 

30 



ZAMA 

another. No man can escape from God. Death only shifts the 
scene. 

Stoicism advocated suicide ; and many philosophies of the past 
taught that a man ought not to outlive honor. 

When one considers not only the chagrin and humiliations 
and mental agonies, but also the rank physical tortures inflicted 
upon the vanquished in times past, the full meaning of Vae 
Victis (Woe to the vanquished!) is brought forcibly to the mind. 
Those were wild-beast times and the jungle-fights are ferocious. 
Plutarch speaking of the proscription list at the close of the 
civil war between Caesar and Anthony says: "The terms of 
their mutual concessions were these: that Caesar should desert 
Cicero, Lepidus his brother Paulus, and Anthony, Lucius 
Caesar, his uncle by his mother's side. Thus they let their anger 
and fury take from them the sense of humanity, and demon- 
strated that no beast is more savage than man, when possessed 
with power answerable to his rage. ' ' And we read in Marlowe 's 
" Tamburlaine " that this mighty despot, conqueror of many 
Asiatic kings, made use of these one time monarchs to draw him 
in his chariot : and that bridled and with bits in their mouths 
they fumed forward under the swishing wire-lash, while galling 
insults goaded on their pangs. 

"Forward, ye jades! 
Now crouch, ye kings of greater Asia! 

* * # # * 

Thro' the streets with troops of conquered kings, 
I'll ride in golden armor like the sun, 
And in my helm a triple plume shall spring 
Spangled with diamonds, dancing in the air, 
To note me emperor of the threefold world." 

Whether this be only "Marlowe's mighty line", or whether 
it be the somewhat fantastic presentation of a dread reality — 
need not be known. The thoughtful student of history knows 
only too well just where to turn for human jungle-scenes. And 

31 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

there are many. From Assyrian cruelty boasting of pyramids 
of severed ears, lips, noses, and the deft art of flaying alive — 
down to Balkan-Turkish atrocities and Mexican murders the 
forest-way is long and dark and dreary. We hope light will 
yet shine upon this way. We dream that the black hags of 
war and of demon cruelty will not dare disport their hideous- 
ness in the future white-light. We would suspend judgment 
as to the past ; we would not condemn Hannibal ; we would play 
on the one-string lyre of hope — forlorn tho' it be as Watts' 
allegorical "Hope" — and we would wait kindly content with 
God's plan for this world and for a better world to come. 



32 



Chapter IV. 

TEUTOBERGER WALD 

In Germany, in the modern principality of the Lippe, may 
still be seen traces of the historic struggle between the Roman 
legions under Varus and the Germanic barbarians led by Armin- 
ius. The names "das Winnefeld" (the field of victory), "die 
Knochenbahn" (the bone-lane), "die Knochenleke" (the bone- 
brook), "der Mordkessel" (the kettle of slaughter), which still 
characterize various places in the gloomy Teutoberger Wald, are 
in themselves reminders of scenes of horror which were once 
dread realities; while scattered here and there may still be seen 
traces of the Roman camp — unmistakable evidence of the one 
time presence of the Roman eagles. 

Trapped. 

Perhaps all is fair in war, and the end justifies the means, 
and the eleventh commandment "Do to the enemy what he'd 
like to do to you", being altogether heartless and godless is 
peculiarly applicable to war: nevertheless the victory won by 
treachery never sounds so clarionly joyous adown the ages as 
the victory following a fair fight; and the deadly defeat that 
came by treachery has in it a pathos that redeems defeat from 
disgrace. Time is just. 

When Varus started out at the head of his legions to quell, 
as he thought, an insurrection of a few unimportant tribes 
scattered along the Weser and the Ems rivers, Germany seemed 
comparatively at peace; and Arminius, the most dreaded war- 

33 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

lord of the barbarians, seemed to have been won over by the 
blandishments of the Roman camp. 

It was a gala day for the troops as with ample supplies, 
generous baggage-wagons, plenty of camp followers, jesters, 
entertainers, they turned away from the frontier and plunged 
into the Black Forest. There was nothing to indicate that con- 
certed action on the part of the Germans was the cause of that 
far distant uprising against Roman authority, and that within 
their ranks were half-Romanized barbarians who would desert 
at a given signal and use their arms against their present com- 
rades ; above all, that Arminius had secretly instigated a general 
uprising and that the Black Forests were blackly alive with the 
foe. 

On went the Roman troops following their treacherous guides 
who purposely led them into the dense marshy depths of the 
woods; and when thus lost and entangled, their cavalry unable 
to advance, and while all the troops were called upon to con- 
struct a rude causeway over which the horses might proceed — 
suddenly from the gloom encompassing them on all sides came 
deadly arrows, missiles, javelins hurled by an unseen foe. 

Varus seems to have been unable to realize that he was the 
victim of a stratagem. His best men, officers and soldiers, were 
falling around him ; his cavalry slipping in slimy blood lay 
floundering on the way; his light-armed auxiliaries, composed in 
great part of brawny German youth, were slinking away and 
becoming strangely one with the forces whence came the ar- 
rows, missiles, javelins. Still Varus urged on the work on the 
causeway, and still veterans advanced to the work as veterans 
fell and at last the gloomy march resumed. 

The attack seemed over and Varus thought some isolated tribe 
of barbarians had taken advantage of their hour of disability 
to harass them on the march. On reaching a declivity of the 
woody plain Varus drew up his forces as best he could in battle 

34 



TEUTOBERGER WALD 

line and thus awaited the coming of the foe. But Arminius was 
not prepared to meet the Romans in battle; his rude warriors 
were no match for the trained Roman soldiers fully protected 
by helmet, cuirass, greaves, and shield. There could have been 
but one result to such an encounter — victory for the Romans, 
defeat for the cause of liberty and native land. 

Arminius held in leash his blood hounds all thro' the night. 
The Romans halted on the slope and, perceiving no enemy near, 
pitched their camp with true Roman precision and then slept 
long and well the heavy sleep of worn out nature that last night 
of mortal life. 

At early dawn, while the Roman camp yet lay moveless, un- 
dreaming of the savage blood-hounds around or the deadly am- 
bush ahead, — Arminius despatched men to the farther end of 
the defile with orders to fell trees and erect an impassable bar- 
ricade. He then sent troops to different points of advantage 
on either side of the defile thro' which the fated army would 
advance ; he gave instructions as to concerted action at the sound 
of the agreed-upon signal, and thus awaited the coming of morn 
and the renewed activities of the Roman camp. 

There is something sternly terrible in the human heart which 
can thus joyfully contemplate the destruction of thousands 
upon thousands of one's fellow mortals. And yet, in this case, 
these Roman soldiers were the concrete embodiment of a cause 
which would enslave Arminius' native land, intrude deadly 
enervation into the integrity of a German home; and more — 
much more : Rome had deeply wronged Arminius, lover of lib- 
erty, lover of native land; but even more deeply had she 
wronged Arminius, the lover, and the man. His wife, Thusnelda, 
was held a captive in Rome and his child, a fair haired boy of 
only five years, had been made to grace a Roman triumph. 
Rivers of blood could not wash away such seared yet burning 
memories from the heart. 

35 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

With fierce exultation did Arminius watch the waking of the 
camp, the taking up of pickets, formation of line, and the slow 
winding motion towards the way, the fatal way, he had fore- 
seen they must go. Had Varus even then become suspicious of 
concerted treachery, he would have hastened back, would have 
plunged into the heart of the unknown wood, would have re- 
mained in camp, would have done anything under the sun rather 
than advance right into that narrow densely wooded way am- 
bushed at every vantage point on both sides and shut in at the 
farther end by that barricade high as the tops of the trees. 
But he looked and knew not; Arminius saw and knew and 
exulted. 

Der Mordkessel. 

Fate is always on the winning side. As day advanced and 
the troops were all now fairly within the ravine, the heavens 
opened in streams of torrential rain. The Black Forest seemed 
to groan with impending doom : old Thor and Odin seemed fight- 
ing for their altars in the Druid wood, and Roman Jove was 
no match for this grim Teutonic Thor. 

Arminius watched from the height ; and just as the vanguard 
rounded the curve at the summit of which rose the barricade of 
trees, the signal for general assault all along the line arose clear 
and decisive from the height. 

The slaughter was appalling. The bulk of the infantry, 
fourteen thousand men, were slain; while the cavalry which at 
first had numbered about eighteen hundred horsemen, partly 
Romans partly provincial, made here its last dread stand against 
the foe and — lost. 

Numonius Vola, a Roman cavalry officer, seeing the utter 
uselessness of the attempt to continue the unfair strife, made a 
bold dash for deliverance. At the head of a small force, he turn- 
ed away from the floundering mass of horses and men and 

36 



TEUTOBERGER WALD 

plunged into the unknown forest. He was, however, soon sur- 
rounded by the Germans, and he and his soldiers were cut to 
pieces. 

A brave band of Romans, last of that death-devoted multitude 
of men, gained a point of vantage on a hill slope and arranging 
themselves in a solid circle presented to the foe an almost im- 
penetrable line of glittering points of spears. The Germans, 
tho' outnumbering them a hundred to one, yet quailed before 
that steely welcome. Perhaps, too, being themselves brave men, 
they were in awe and admiration of that heroic despair; per- 
haps, being perfectly sure of their prey, they were loth to 
break the savage satisfaction of gloating upon its desperation; 
perhaps no Arnold Winkelreid opportunely came forth to offer 
himself in sacrifice upon those outstretched points and so wedge 
open the way ; perhaps, and most dread truth-perhaps ! 
those wild children of the Druid wood saw safely entrenched be- 
hind that helpless steel — worthy victims for Odin. And thus the 
night passed — that awful last night upon earth for the last of 
the legions of Varus. 

There is an open space on the flat top of an overhanging 
rock, darkly terrible even today and still the favorite haunt of 
century old oaks : and this place tradition points out as the spot 
upon which human sacrifices were of old offered to Thor and 
to Odin. And thither the blue eyed barbarians dragged those 
Roman soldiers, bravest of the brave, who had stood entrenched 
behind their helpless steel until exhaustion overcame them and 
who at last overpowered by sheer force of numbers, had been 
taken alive by the implacable foe and dragged to the altar of 
sacrifice. 

Strange indeed is that delusion, so often inextricably as- 
similable with religious fanaticism, wherein a man makes him- 
self believe that he honors or placates Deity by immolating there- 
to his own enemy ! Truly the human-heart god is the deification 

37 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

of its own desires. And that God-man upon the Cross who is 
essentially the everlasting antithesis of the desires of the human 
heart is not of man. We can understand Jove and Juno and 
Mars and Venus and even Odin and Thor — they are ourselves 
only more so : not so the Christ crucified on Calvary. 

Effects. 



Fifteen thousand eight hundred men are estimated to have 
formed the army lost in the Teutoberger Wald. This irrepar- 
able loss gave to the heart of Cassar Augustus its pathetic cry 
enduring even to the day of death, ' ' Varus, Varus, give back my 
legions, Varus ! ' ' 

Suetonius tells us that at the news of the Black Forest dis- 
aster, Augustus, in bitter grief, beat his head against the wall 
crying incessantly and inconsolably, "Bring back my legions. 
Varus ' ' : and that after many years had passed and even to the 
day of his death he lamented the loss as irreparable. Not, 
indeed, because so many men had fallen ; Rome was prodigal of 
human life ; but because his prophetic eye saw in this defeat the 
beginning of the end of Roman supremacy ; the change of policy 
from aggressive to defensive; the fatal turning of a tide which 
should roll down upon southern Europe in inundations of deso- 
lation. 

Many other ancient writers attest the seriousness of this de- 
feat to Rome and corroborate what Seutonius says as to its 
effect upon Augustus. Dion Cassius says, "Then Augustus, 
when he heard the calamity of Varus, rent his garment, and was 
in great affliction for the troops he had lost, and for terror 
respecting the Germans and the Gauls. And his chief alarm 
was, that he expected them to push on against Italy and Rome ; 
and there were no Roman youth fit for military duty that were 

38 



TEUTOBERGER WALD 

worth speaking of, and the allied populations that were at all 
serviceable had been wasted away." 

Florus also expresses its effects: "Eac clade factum est ut 
imperium quod in litore oceani non steterat, in ripa Bheni 
fluminis staret." (The result of this disaster was that the em- 
pire which had not been content that it be bounded by the 
shore of ocean was forced to accept as its boundary the River 
Rhine) . 

Abminius. 

There was an attempt made many years ago to erect a statue 
to the memory of Arminius. The site chosen for this impos- 
ing monument was, of course, the Teutoberger Wald. It was 
suggested that contributions be received only from the English 
and German nations and that the statue should stand as a 
memorial of the common ancestry and heritage of the German- 
English races. 

Arminius is indeed more truly an English national hero than 
was Caractacus, if the Saxon genealogy be properly traced. 

However, the project fell through. England and Germany 
are not yet amicably one under the tutelage of a far off German 
war-lord: and no colossal statue of Arminius — successful 
strategist and wholesale slaughterer — rises today in gloomy 
Teutoberger Wald from out the dark depths of Der Mordkessel. 



39 



Chapter V. 

ADRIANOPLE 

Among the struggles of the past which seem decisively to 
have subverted the old order of things and ushered in the new, 
is the battle of Adrianople. There Valens, Emperor of Rome, 
was killed in battle with the Goths ; and the proud Roman army 
hitherto deemed invincible, almost invulnerable, was defeated 
and destroyed. 

How the wild-eyed children of the North must have gazed 
with astonishment upon one another as they stood victors on 
that field ! They had not dared to hope that a Roman army would 
go down under their undisciplined assault; and that an Em- 
peror of Rome should lie dead upon the battlefield was far be- 
yond their wildest dream. Doubtless they felt within them that 
first awakening of brutal youth-strength: race-childhood was 
gone; race-manhood not yet come. And enervated old Rome; 
cultured, wily, effetely civilized Romans lay at the feet of these 
youthful, battle-flushed barbarians : and history yet hears the 
cries that arose as those feet advanced ruthlessly trampling. 

Rivers. 

If rivers could write history — what would the Nile tell us, the 
Tigris-Euphrates, the Granicus-Issus, the Metaurus, the Aufidus, 
the Tiber, the Danube, the Moskva, the Maritza? 

Mysterious Nile — with sources for ages unknown; with inun- 
dations death-dealing, life-giving; with crocodiles and alligators 
and implacable river God: with Theban Karnak-Luxor and the 
Necropolis; with Memphis and the Pyramids and the great 

40 



ADRIANOPLE 

Sphinx; with dynastic silences perturbed by a few great names 
— Menes, Cheops, Rameses; with the barge of Cleopatra wafted 
by scent-sick breezes to a waiting Anthony; with cosmopolitan 
bad, sad, modern Memphis-Cairo. 

Tigris-Euphrates valley — cradle of the human race ! home of 
the Accadians, a pre-historic people that had passed away and 
whose language had become a dead classic tongue when Nineveh 
and Babylon were young. Who were the Accadians? Who were 
the Etruscans? The Euphrates and the Tiber will not tell. 

Hanging Gardens of Babylon — world- wonder : Babylon as 
described by Herodotus — city of blood and beauty and winged 
power: city surfeited with the slaughter of Assyrian Nineveh: 
city of the great temple of Bel : city of palaces guarded by ma- 
jestic colossi — Sphinxes, winged lions, man-head bulls; city of 
gold and precious stones and ivory edifices and streets of burn- 
ished brass: city of the fatal Euphrates, of Baltshazzar's ban- 
quet and the dread hand-writing upon the wall: city of a de- 
struction so tremendous, so terrible that the lamentation there- 
of, caught vibrantly in Biblical amber, rings on and ever on 
adown the ages, "Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen!" 

"They say the Lion and the Lizard keep 

The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep: 

And Bahram, that great Hunter — the Wild Ass 

Stamps o'er his Head, but cannot break his sleep." 

— Omar Khayyam. 

And the site of Babylon, that mighty Paris of the past, is not 
now authoritatively known. Does the river know; does it re- 
member the glory and the horror-night and the gloom? Is the 
sad sighing of rivers caused by the sorrows they see as they 
flow? And is the eternal moan of ocean the aggregate of the 
throbs of woe that thi^ rivers have felt as they flow? Does 
nature know of mortal woe, does she, indeed, lament with 
Moschus the death of pastoral Bion, with Shelley, the untimely 
departure of Keats, our "Adonais"? 

41 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

Fact or fancy, suggestive silence or assertive sound, poet- 
dream or cynic-certainty — which draws nearer to truth? which 
shall prevail? 

Granicus-Issus — bloody outlets of the wounds of the world 
when Macedonian Alexander made Europe and Asia bleed! 

Was Alexander the Great great ? Moralize as we may ; shud- 
der at the grim bloody outlets of a wounded world; wonder at 
the mad folly of the masses who, at the caprice of a magnetic 
madman, wildly slay and submit to be slain; see clearly, in the 
cut and statuary past, the dolt unreason of it all, the uselessness, 
the Pelion-Ossa horror: yet honestly recognize that deep down 
in the perverse human heart there lurks loving admiration for 
— Alexander the Great. Rameses, Cyrus, Alexander, Hannibal, 
Caesar, Napoleon — we cannot dissociate these men from their 
deeds; how then can we disapprove their deeds and approve 
these men? Why is it that a Shelley, Byron, De Musset, 
Swinburne, Omar — ad infinitum — enthrall us by the charm of 
their written words, even tho' we disagree with them in their 
tenets, their philosophy of life, their conclusions : and we cen- 
sure and condemn their private lives! Can men, as Catullus 
sings to Lesbia, both "adore and scorn" the same object at the 
same time? There are many replies to these questions, but no 
satisfactory answer. Psychologists, take note. 

The military hero, the "chief who in triumph advances", 
the Warrior Bold, the idols of history will continue to glimmer 
secure in cob-web fascination even when armaments shall have 
been banished from off the face of the earth and wars shall be 
remembered only as the myths of days that are no more. We 
forgive Granicus-Issus-Arbela for the sake of Alexander the 
Great. 

And the conqueror of the world died, aged thirty-two, in 
Babylon. This cognizant old city and Accadian Euphrates were 

42 



ADRIANOPLE 

too wearily wise to wonder two thousand years ago. They had 
seen the rise and fall of many monarchs : and one more, this boy- 
wonder from the West, could arouse no throb of pitying sur- 
prise from scenes that dully remembered dead and gone 
dynasties. Why, death was old when Accadia was young ten 
thousand years ago; lament this stripling? No. And thus 
went out the conquered Conqueror of the world. 

The little stream Metaurus witnessed perhaps the most mo- 
mentous battle of history. Yet no magic name shines forth 
from that strife either as victor or vanquished. Nero, the Ro- 
man consul, victor; and Hasdrubal, brother of Hannibal, van- 
quished; are not the names of favorites of fame. As Byron 
says, of a thousand students hearing the name Nero nine hun- 
dred and ninety-nine recall the last Julian Emperor of Rome, 
and one laboriously remembers the hero of Metaurus. And yet 
were historians endowed with Platonic vision whereby the great 
is perceived in the small, doubtless the bloody conflict by the 
stream would be seen pivotal of history. 

hopes and fears and blasted dreams of so gigantic scale, 
played on a stage of Alpine eminence, no wonder you stand 
spectacular thro ' the ages ! 

"Carthagini jam non ego niintios 

Mittam superbos. Occidit, occidit 
Spes omnis et fortuna nostri 

Nominis, Hasdrubale interemto." 

— Horace. 

"Alas, I shall not now send to Carthage proud bearers of good 
news," said Hannibal, as he mournfully gazed at the severed 
head of his brother, hurled insolently into his camp, even as 
with impatient hope he awaited news of that brother's coming 
and dreamed the dream of their successfully united forces, at- 
tack on Rome, victory, and the dispatch of proud messengers 
to Carthage. With prophetic gaze did the hero of C annas see 

43 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

in that bloodily dead face the negation of his eight years' vic- 
tory in Italy, his recall to Carthage, his defeat at Zama, his 
exile and bitter death, and the onward stride of world-conquer- 
ing Rome over the ashes of Carthage. 

Cities that have been and that are no more : Niobe-woe : rivers 
that know of that long ago and wearily sigh as they flow ! 

Old Tiber disdains the paragraph; a volume for it or — 
nothing. 

Lordly dark Danube — so long the barrier between the known 
and the unknown, civilization and barbarism, the magic sun- 
gardens of Italy and the Teutoberger Wald! 

"Varus, Varus, give back my legions. Varus" — that cry of 
Caesar Augustus, Ruler of Rome, Mistress of the World, was the 
first wild note of a chorus of woe that arose in full diapason 
when Valens fell in the battle of Adrianople. From the vic- 
tory of Arminius over the Roman troops under Quintilius 
Varus in the Black Forest of Germany (A. D. 9) to the decisive 
victory of the combined Gothic tribes over the veteran Roman 
army under Valens near the capital of the Empire, the sym- 
pathetic student of history may hear ever that losing cry of the 
Emperor-seer, "Give back my legions, Varus." 

Legend relates that on the Roman northern frontier there 
stood a colossal statue of Victory; it looked toward the North, 
and with outstretched hand pointing to the Teutoberger Wald, 
seemed to urge on to combat and victory : but the night fol- 
lowing the massacre of the Roman troops in the Black Forest, 
and the consequent suicide of Varus, this statue did, of its own 
accord, turn round and face the South, and with outstretched 
hand pointing Romeward, seemed to urge on to combat and 
victory the wild-eyed children of the North. Thus did the God- 
dess of Victory forsake Rome. 

The Moskva river is yet memory-lit with the fires of burning 

44 



ADRIANOPLE 

Moscow; and its murmuring ever yet faintly echoes the toll, 
toll, toll of the Kremlin bell. Three days and three nights of 
conflagration — and then the charred and crumbling stillness! 
Snow on the hills and on the plains; white, peaceful snow heal- 
ing the wounds of Borodino, blanketing uncouth forms, hiding 
the horror; but within the fated city, no snow, nothing white, 
nothing peaceful; gaunt icicle-blackness o'er huge, prostrate 
Pan-Slavism. 

Yet surely cognizant old Moscow, secure in ruins, sighed, too, 
o'er the gay and gallant Frenchmen caught fatefully in the 
trap of desolation. Perhaps, too, the compensating lamentation 
of distant Berezina mingled genially with the murmuring 
Moskva. 

Little Nap Bonaparte met his Waterloo in Moscow: history 
to the contrary notwithstanding. 

"The soldiers fight and the kings are called heroes," says 
the Talmud. Of all that nameless host of ardent, life-loving men 
who entered Moscow, stood aghast amid the ruins, started back 
on that awful across-Continent retreat — the world knows only 
Napoleon, history poses Napoleon, Meissonier paints Napoleon, 
Byron apostrophizes Napoleon, Emerson eulogizes Napoleon, 
Rachmaninoff plays Napoleon, and the hero-lover loves Napoleon. 
Why? Is there any answer to ten thousand Whys perched 
prominently and grinning insolently in this mad play-house of 
the Planets? None. 

"What hope of answer or redress 
Beyond the veil, beyond the veil ! 

* * * • • 

And yet we somehow trust that good 

Will be the final goal of ill. 
That not a worm is cloven in vain; 

That not a moth with vain desire 
Is shriveled in a fruitless fire 

Or but subserves another's gain." 

• * * # • 

45 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

The Maritza river, at one time called the Orestes river, is 
formed by the confluence of two unimportant streams. Adrian- 
ople is favorably situated, and ranks next to Constantinople in 
natural advantages. 

Orestes, son of Agamemnon, built the city and gave his name 
both to the city and the principal river. Emperor Hadrian 
changed the name to Hadrianopolis (Hadrian's city), thence our 
modernized Adrianople. One almost regrets that the name of 
the restless Orestes did not continue appropriately to designate 
the city of so varying fortunes and vivid vicissitudes. 

Adrianople was the Turkish capital for nearly a hundred 
years ; it was abandoned in 1453 w^hen Constantinople came into 
Turkish control. The ruins of the palaces of the Sultans yet 
grace the ancient capital. 

Adrianople is the faithful Moslem city of forty mosques. 
The mosque Selim II. is a close rival to Santa Sofia. 

Greek and Macedonian, Roman and Byzantine, Christian and 
Moslem, Turk and Bulgarian, influences have in turn dominated 
the city of three rivers ; each re-baptizing it with blood : and 
the end is not yet. 

In 1718, Charles XII. of Sweden was a guest in the castle of 
Tumurtish. Little then did the valiant Madman of the North 
dream how ignominiously his own meteoric career would close: 
little did he see himself as fixed in fame, not by his com- 
bats and victories, not even by his gallant defeat at Pultowa, 
but by being the inspiration in the moralizing mind of Dr. 
Samuel Johnson of the following lines : 

"He left a name — at which the world grew pale — 
To point a moral or adorn a tale." 

The Vanity of Human Wishes is indeed exemplified not only 
in Charles XII. of Sweden, but also in many other favorites of 
fortune : not one of whom, perhaps, but would add to or alter his 
own peculiar setting in fame — if perchance he should be able 
to recognize himself at all in the historic figure masquerading 

46 



ADRIANOPLE 

under his name. How seldom does it chance that the world 
honors a man for what that man feels to be his best title to 
honor ? 

Would Julius Csesar, red-hand conqueror of Gaul, know him- 
self as the Shakespearean hero? And Nero, Louis XI., Wallen- 
stein, Henry VIII., Roderick Borgia — would they claim even 
passing acquaintance with themselves as fame has fixed them? 
If these men took any of their fighting qualities with them into 
the Spirit Land, there must have been some flamy duelling when 
they met their respective biographers. 

And so the blood of battle bathed Adrianople one thousand 
five hundred and thirty-five years ago and — last year (1913). 
And we talk learnedly about the defeat and death of 
the Roman Emperor Valens, and of the effect of that victory 
upon our respected barbarian ancestors with consequent doings 
of destiny, etc., etc. — because we don't know: and we say little 
about the Servian-Bulgarian-Turkish capture of Adrianople last 
year, because it is too near and — ive knoiv. Then, too, who can 
poetize or moralize or even sentimentally scribble over the yet 
hideously bleeding wounds of war ? When they are healed, when 
the moaning is still, the mangled forms moveless, the cripples on 
crutches gone, the lamentations silenced, the last-lingering heart- 
ache soothed in Death — why, then, perhaps ; but not now. Battle 
in the real is a human butchering: and there is no other de- 
lusion under the sun more diabolically sardonic than that which 
makes animal savagery seem patriotism and the red-hand 
slaughter-man a hero. From the Homeric Hector- Achilles, de- 
liver the world, Lord. 

Strange, indeed, is the contrariety between the real of War 
and the ideal, the far away hero and the near Huerta, the blood 
spilled and stilled and ihe bright life-blood spilling, the sorrow 
silenced and the agonized cries that arise, the battle of Adrian- 
ople, 378 A. D., and the siege and capture and re-capture of 
Adrianople (1912-1913). 

47 



Chapter VI, 

CHALONS 

If, in the battle of Chalons, Attila and his Huns had been 
victorious over the combined forces of the semi-Christianized 
Visigoths under Theoderic and the Romans under ^tius — then 
Hungvari influence rather than Teutonic would have dominant- 
ly determined the progress of the civilized world. 

Rome had fallen: eflEete in her withered hand lay the rod of 
empire: and swarming about her, now quarrelling among them- 
selves and with her, now fraternizing, but always more or less 
in awe of her prostrate majesty were her barbarous children — 
Franks, Burgundians, Alans, Lombards, Gauls, Alemanni, 
Visigoths, and Ostrogoths. These had known Rome in the hour 
of her pride and power; they revered the Rome that was for 
the sake of the Rome that had been ; they had imbibed something 
of her culture, her military discipline, her laws, her religion. 
Semi-civilized, semi-Christianized, with the bold Teutonic vir- 
tues yet pristine from the Black Forests of Germany, — they were 
the possible material of an excellence surpassing that of Rome, 
even when Rome could boast of excellence. 

But about 450 A. D. hordes, innumerable hordes, velut iinda 
supervenit undam (even as wave upon wave) of hideously ugly, 
lithe, little, wiry, imp-like men poured into Europe from the 
Asiatic lands north of the Black Sea. By their numbers, their 
lightning-like rapidity, their uncanny appearance, and their 
brute ferocity, they quickly swept the countries before them, 
put to flight the Alans, the Ostrogoths, and other tribes dwelling 
along the course of the Danube, and finally under their terrible 

48 



CHALONS 

leader Atzel (Attila), Scourge of God, they confronted the 
civilized and semi-civilized world in arms on the plain of 
Chalons. 

Battle. 

From early dawn even until darkness frowned over the 
field the blood-feast flowed : and Death was satiated. 

Attila withdrew to his camp. He left an effective guard 
around his wagons and outposts and made every thing ready for 
a prolonged and obstinate resistance to the attack anticipated at 
early dawn. Nevertheless he built for himself a massive funeral 
pile, placed upon it his most valued treasures and his favorite 
wives, and was fully prepared and resolute to apply the torch, 
ascend the pyre, and so perish in the flames — should defeat fall 
to his fortune on the following day. 

Morning dawned. The awful work of death on the preceding 
day appalled both armies ; miles upon miles of outstretched plain 
lay covered with carnage ; the all-night- writhing mounds of men 
were ominously still. Sullenly did foe gaze upon foe; but each 
recoiled from renewal of the slaughter. 

Still the advantage was with the allies; for Attila, so late 
the fierce aggressor, was barricaded in his camp — tho' grimly 
awaiting attack indeed, and prepared to resist to the end and 
die like a lion in his den. 

Did the Romans know of that funeral pile? They may not, 
indeed, have known the peculiar manner in which Attila would 
seek death, but they knew that he would die by his own hand — 
if the worst came. Cato had done so and Varus and Brutus 
and Cassius and Hannibal and Anthony and Cleopatra — ad in- 
finitum. 

Addison, in his tragedy Cato, has graphically portrayed the 
conflicting thoughts and emotions in the mind of a man who 

49 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

feels that life cannot longer be borne and yet shrinks back from 

the horror and the dread unknown. 

Cato had lost the battle of Utica. He had been true to 

Pompey, he had fought the last battle for the cause of Pompey 

— and lost. And Caesar was indeed god of this world, and the 

morrow held no place on all this so vast earth for Cato; this 

lost-battle night must end it all. He read Plato's discourse on 

the immortality of the soul, and in the lines of Addison, thus 

soliloquized : 

"It must be so. Plato, thou reason'st well: 
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire. 
This longing after immortality? 
Or whence this secret dread and inward horror 
Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul 
Back on herself and startles at destruction? 
'Tis the divinity that stirs within us; 
'Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, 
And intimates eternity to man. 
« * * * * 

The soul, secured in her existence, smiles 
At the drawn dagger and defies its point. 
The stars shall fade away, the sun himself 
Grow dim with age and nature sink in years; 
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth 
Unhurt amidst the war of elements. 
The wreck of matter and the crash of worlds." 

But Attila did not mount his funeral pile. The day passed 
without attack upon Attila 's formidable position. King Theodor- 
ic lay dead upon the plain and his son Prince Thorismund, who 
had distinguished himself in the battle, was victoriously pro- 
claimed King of the Visigoths. 

^tius, Valentinian 's able general, held in leash both the 
Romans and the Visigoths even while Attila slowly broke up 
camp and withdrew in long lines leading northward. 

Effect. 

The effect was that of victory for the allies. Rome was saved 
from a fresh infusion of barbarism whilst her Teutonic element 

50 



CHALONS 

was still semi-barbarous. The German characteristics — love of 
liberty, independence, and reverential regard for women — thus 
dominated the Christian civilization which now began to flour- 
ish vigorously out from the decadence of pagan Rome. 

If, as Byron says, 

"Cervantes laughed Spain's chivalry away," 

then also it may be said that Lucan laughed Rome's gods and 
goddesses away. The laugh is the most insidiously potent of 
all destructive forces when the laugher is loved and the times 
are attuned to hear. Not satire, not personal bitterness, not 
even the withering invectives of a Juvenal are as sweepingly ef- 
fective as the quills of ridicule, the inescapable miasma of the 
laugh. Once let the grin distort the frown of Zeus and 
majesty trembles, awe smiles, reverence dies. 

And so the pagan deities were dead; their temples empty 
and meaningless; and thundering Jove and jealous Juno and 
murderous Mars and all the other deifications of the all too 
human heart of man were impotently silent under the spell 
of the solemn central figure of the new religion — Christ on the 
Cross. 

And the Church in the name and with the power of that 
sublime Sufferer taught the reverse of all that paganism had 
taught; of all that the world had hitherto heard and heeded; 
of all that the all too human heart of man held as dearest and 
best. "Love your enemies," said the Church to the men who 
had fought at Chalons. "Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are 
the clean of heart, Blessed are the peacemakers", reiterated the 
Church to her semi-barbarous children. And they understood 
only in part, and they did deeds of appalling atrocity even while 
acquiescing to her teachings: for the will to do good was, in- 
deed, emotionally present with them, but the power so to do 
failed them crucially. Yet their sins were of surface-passions 

51 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

not of the inmost heart; for they were ever in reverential awe 
of the sublime Sufferer on the Cross; for he spoke as no man 
ever yet had spoken, and he lived what he said, and he died 
praying for his murderers : and all this is not of man — as none 
knew better than they who knew the naked human heart. 

Attila. 

History has not done justice to Attila. History has not done 
justice to any lost cause. For the winners, not the losers, are 
the writers as well as the makers of history, and all forces com- 
bine to make them unjust to the lost cause. 

Herodotus gives us the story of Marathon, Thermopylae, 
Platea, Salamis; Persia had no Herodotus: Homer extols the 
exploits of the Grecian army, the valor of Achilles ; but Hector 
had no Homer: Roman historians tell the story of the Punic 
wars; Carthage from her desolate site sown with salt cares not 
what they say, whilst Hannibal, bravest of the brave, and 
supreme military genius, speaks on the historic page only from 
the lips of the hated Romans. 

When Protestantism finally won in England and the long 
able reign of Elizabeth established it firmly upon a political 
basis, then were fulminated against the Church of Rome all those 
unjust accusations and gross misrepresentations which, crystal- 
lized in history and in literature, seem ineradicable as fate. 
But truth is older than history or literature, and more analyt- 
ically powerful than the synthetic forces of crystallization, and 
patiently prevalent even over fate. 

Elizabeth's very legitimacy depended upon the establishment 
of Protestantism in England and the overthrow of Catholicity; 
and to this two-fold end the energies of the very astute daughter 
of Henry VIII. were undeviatingly directed. 

It takes about three hundred years from the time of a cata- 

52 



CHALONS 

clysmic upheavel of any kind before the minds of men can view 
it dispassionately or estimate it without bias. But what are 
three hundred years to age-old Truth? 

Elizabeth possessed, in addition to the terse Tudor qualities, 
the rare gift of foresight. She knew the power of the pen and 
the possibilities for fame or infamy in the men of genius of her 
time. And so her court was open to the great men of that day 
and her smile of patronage was ever ready to welcome poet, 
artist, dramatist, politician, warrior, traveler, historian, and 
statesman : she became all to all and she won all. 

As Oloriana in Spenser's immortal "Faerie Queen" she reigns 
forever. Bacon, Spenser, Sidney Smith, Raleigh, Voltaire — as 
Voices having a thousand echoes throughout the years — have 
amply rewarded that patient foresight and have fixed her in 
fame as — what she was to them — Good Queen Bess. 

And so Attila and his Huns in low long sinuously winding 
northern lines left behind them the carnage strewn plain of 
Chalons, and the camp with its ominous pyre, and the dazed foe. 
And thus victory remained to -^tius, last of the Romans: and 
the field of Chalons which saved civilization and semi-civilization 
from an untimely intrusion of rank barbarism; which secured 
domination to the Teutonic race rather than to the Sarmatic; 
which freed Europe from Asia — was the last victory of imperial 
Rome. 

Attila died two years later; some say as the victim of poison 
secretly mixed with his food by ^tius' ever vigilant spies. 
With him his vast empire passed away : and the leader who once 
claimed as proud titles, — "Atzel, Descendant of the Great Nim- 
rod. By the Grace of God, King of the Huns, the Goths, the 
Danes, and the Medes. The Dread of the World" — died ig- 
nominiously one carousal wedding night : and history, ever un- 
just to a lost cause, writes his name among the Almosts and 
calmly commends the destiny by which Attila and his Hunnish 
hordes were defeated in the great battle of Chalons. 

53 



Chapter VII. 

TOURS 

The battle of Tours had as result the dominance of the Aryan 
race over the Semitic in Europe ; and of the Cross over the 
Crescent throughout the world. As Gibbon says speaking of the 
phenomenal conquests of the followers of Mohammed : " A victor- 
ious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles 
from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the 
repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to 
the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland ; the Rhine 
is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Ara- 
bian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the 
mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran 
might now be taught in the Schools of Oxford, and her pulpits 
might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and 
truth of the revelation of Mahomet. From such calamities was 
Christendom delivered by the genius and fortune of one man." 
(Charles Martel). 

Persia, Lydia, northern Africa, Spain, had successively fall- 
en under the devouring zeal of the fanatics of the desert. Hot 
and arid and consuming as the sun o'er yellow sands was the 
inspiration of the Prophet fire-breathing thro' the Koran. "The 
sword," says Mahomet, "is the key of heaven. A drop of blood 
shed in the cause of God is of more avail than two months of 
fasting and prayer; whoso falls in battle, all his sins are for- 
given ; at the day of judgment his wounds shall be as resplend- 
ent as Vermillion and odoriferous as musk." Hearts thus 
athirsting aflame had as their dream-goal, their vermillion glory 

54 



TOURS 

— the conquest and subjugation of the city of the Caesars, the 
city of the Church, Rome, Immortal Rome. 

From the Bosphorus to the Gibraltar glowed the victor Cres- 
cent with extremities burning into Europe. Unsuccessful on the 
Bosphorus but successful on the Gibraltar, Spain was soon en- 
veloped in its fanatic tire and its flame-tongues darted over the 
Pyrenees. 

The Saracens of Spain were commanded by Abderame, fav- 
orite of the caliph Hashen, victor of many fields, idol of the 
army, and devout believer in the promises of the Prophet. Ab- 
derame was proud of his battle scars, not yet indeed resplendent 
as Vermillion and odoriferous as musk, but potentially so and 
cherished accordingly. He would yet slay "many cut-throat 
dogs of misbelievers ' ' and so gain more vermillion. One is here 
tempted to say, in the words of Virgil describing the sacrifice of 
Iphigenia, 

"Learn thou then 
To what damned deeds religion urges men." 

Too bad that the word "religion" must needs do service to 
express the extravagances of mythology, the ravings of 
fanaticism, and the teachings of the gentle Christ. 

Eudes, duke of Aquitaine, first opposed the Moslems as they 
advanced beyond the Pyrenees. He was at first successful but 
later suffered a signal defeat at Toulouse, "in so much so", says 
an old chronicler, "that only God could count the number of 
Christians slain." Eudes himself escaped and hastening north- 
ward sought the aid of Charles, duke of Austrasia, mayor of the 
palace, and soon to be known as Charles Martel (Charles the 
Hammer. ) 

On came the conquering Saracen hosts, grown insolent by 
victory, deeming themselves invincible, and proudly confident in 
the destiny that should lead them to Rome. Asia and Africa 

55 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

were in arms against Europe ; the old against the new ; maturity 
against lusty youth; and they met steel to steel on the plains 
of Tours. 

"He either fears his fate too much 

Or his deserts are small; 
Who dares not put it to the touch 

And gain or lose it all." 

Tours towers in solemn awe in the vague What might have 
been. Was it wise to have risked Christendom on the issue of 
one battle? The result says Yes; but — 

Upon what seeming trifles turns the hinge of destiny! The 
casting-vote of Callimachus, urged by the eloquence of Miltiades, 
made Marathon; panic -fear let loose among Darius' million men 
made Arbela; an eclipse of the sun won at Zama; Teutoberger 
Wald, Chalons, Tours — invisible, unknown, but not the less 
effective were the forces in these fights making fatefully for de- 
feat and for victory. That which we term a trifle may be as a 
single bead of perspiration ; trifling in itself, no doubt, but repre- 
sentative of a force far from trifling. 

Battle raged indecisively all day long from early light till 
dark. Prince Charles seemed to wield the hammer of Thor. 
Abderame fell. The Saracens withdrew sullenly within their 
tents. Quiet darkness gathered mournfully over the living, the 
dying, and the dead. 

And the next morning there was a great silence in the Mos- 
lem camp ; in so much that the Christians trembled as at some 
uncanny treachery and stood awaiting they knew not what. 
But as the early morning hours passed and broad daylight 
brought back manly courage, the Christian army approached 
the camp of the enemy. It was deserted. The foe had fled. 
Christendom had won. 

Charles did not immediately pursue the fleeing Moslem 
hordes. He still feared treachery. Perhaps, too, some waken- 

56 



':ouES 

ing sentiment of humanity restrained him from further blood- 
shed. The vast plains of Tours were covered with ghastly forms 
horribly hacked and hewed but now strangely still. According 
to an old chronicle the number of Moslem dead upon the field 
of Tours was three hundred and fifty thousand; that of the 
Christians, fifteen hundred. Surely that was enough of 
slaughtering death even for Karl Martel. 

The battle of Tours was fought Oct. 4, 732 A. D. The fol- 
lowing Spring Charles went in pursuit of the Saracens who 
were still ravaging southern France. They withdrew from 
place to place as Charles drew near; and ultimately — without 
risking another encounter with the Hammer of Thor — they re- 
tired across the Pyrenees. France was freed from the Crescent. 

The Eighth Century. 

All writers agree that the eighth century was the darkest 
age of the so-called Dark Ages. The Benedictine monks, au- 
thors of L' histoire Utieraire de la France say that the eighth 
century was the darkest, the most ignorant, the most harharous 
that France had ever seen. It seemed to be the seething cul- 
mination of four hundred years of Barbarism, one infusion fol- 
lowing fast upon another. 

In 407 A. D. the Vandals from the upper Rhine invaded Gaul 
and Germany : in 410 the West Goths under Alaric besieged and 
sacked Rome : in 429 the Vandals under Genseric came down 
upon Numidia and Mauritania : in 443 the Burgundian invaders 
settled on the upper Rhone and on the Saone : in 451 came the 
Huns under Attila. Towards the end of the fifth century the 
Franks from the lower Rhine came into Gaul, destroying every 
vestige of civilization that had survived the invasion and occu- 
pation of France by the Vandals and Burgundians. About this 
time, too, the Angles and Saxons established themselves in Brit- 

57 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

ain, and the Visigoths in Spain. In the sixth and seventh cen- 
turies the Heruli, the East Goths, and the Lombards destroyed 
whatever remained of Roman civilization in northern Italy. 

And now to complete this scene of chaotic confusion came 
the fanatic Moslem hordes from the south. Surely every remain- 
ing reminder of old-world civilization seemed about to be crush- 
ed and broken to pieces between these contending crest waves 
of barbarism. The cataclysmic clash and crash came at the 
battle of Tours. 

The Church. 

William Turner, S. T. D. in his History of Philosophy speak- 
ing of the eighth century says: "We can scarcely realize the 
desolation that during these centuries reigned throughout what 
had been the Roman Empire. Although surrounded by all the 
external signs and conditions of dissolution and decay, the 
Church remained true to her mission of moral and intellectual 
enlightenment, drawing the nations to her by the very grandeur 
of her confidence in her mission of peace, and by the sheer force 
of her obstinate belief in her own ability to lift the new peoples 
to a higher spiritual and intellectual life. It was these traits in 
the character of the Church that especially attracted the bar- 
barian kings. But, though towards the end of the fifth century 
Clovis became a Christian, it was not until the beginning of the 
ninth century that the efforts of the Church to reconquer the 
countries of Europe to civilization began to show visible re- 
sults. The Merovingian kings — the "do-nothing-kings," as they 
were styled — could scarcely be called civilized. Even Charle- 
magne, who was the third of the Carolingian dynasty, could 
hardly write his name." 

The Church is for all ages and all conditions of men. She 
is equally effective in answering the soul-questionings of savage 
peoples, barbarous, semi-civilized, cultured, and jesthetic: of a 
superstitious monk of the Thebaid and of the philosopher 

58 



TOURS 

Augustine, Bishop of Hippo: of a Thais of the desert and of 
Ursula, virgin and martyr: of Charles Martel, of the bloody 
battle Tours, and the gentle Francis of Assissi: of Constantine, 
Clovis, Charlemagne; and of John Henry Cardinal Newman, 
Mangan, Oscar Wilde, Strindberg, and Francis Thompson. As 
the manna that fell from heaven for the Israelites had in it 
every taste that might be in accordance with the peculiar desire 
of him who tasted, so in like manner, the Church of all ages 
has ever brought to her children that which was in accordance 
with their peculiar needs and desires. Fiercely kind, sternly 
kind, firmly kind, humanly kind, and divinely kind — as occasion 
may require, the Church has been and may be. 

In Charles Martel, hero of Tours, the Church had a gal- 
lant defender. Under his son Pepin, and his greater grandson 
Charlemagne, the Church made that leap forward, away from 
ninth centurj^ barbarism, up and onward to her fair and full 
flowering in the thirteenth century Rennaissance. 

Greek Fire. 

At the second siege of Constantinople, when Moslemah with 
a land force of one hundred twenty thousand Arabs and Persians 
stood ready to attack the city; and a fleet of eighteen hundred 
ships — as a moving forest, — covered the Bosphorus, Constanti- 
nople seemed doomed. A night attack of the combined land 
and sea forces was planned ; and no one might reasonably doubt 
the issue of the conflict. But here again the unexpected hap- 
pened. 

Truly the race is not to the swift nor is the battle to the 
strong. Marathon, iSalamis, Arbela, Tours, Cressy, Potiers, 
Agincourt, Saratoga, Valmy, — were battles not to the strong. 
"There's a divinity that shapes our ends." 

As night approached and the formidable "moving forest" 

59 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

gathered round the doomed city, suddenly there darted amidst 
the towering timbers — lighted monsters, Greek Fire-ships belch- 
ing forth from dragon-mouthed prows the fatal Greek Fire. 
Here, there, everywhere plunged the fire-breathing ships leaving 
behind them Moslem vessels in flames. The Bosphorus was on 
fire. Of the fated soldiers in that mighty fleet of eighteen 
hundred ships, few escaped to make known the tragedy or to 
describe the horribly magnificent scene. 

What was the Greek Fire? how compounded? how used? 
how propelled? does the world of today know the secret of 
Greek Fire? Gibbons says: "The historian who presumes to 
analyze this extraordinary composition should suspect his own 
ignorance and that of his Byzantine guides, so prone to the 
marvelous, so careless, and, in this instance, so jealous of the 
truth. From their obscure, and perhaps fallacious, hints it 
should seem that the principal ingredient of the Greek Fire was 
the naphtha, or liquid bitumen, a light, tenacious, and inflam- 
mable oil, which springs from the earth, and catches fire as soon 
as it comes in contact with the air. The naphtha was mingled, 
I know not by what methods or in what proportions, with sul- 
phur and with pitch that is extracted from evergreen firs. From 
this mixture, which produced a thick smoke and a loud ex- 
plosion, proceeded a fierce and obstinate flame, which not only 
rose in perpendicular ascent, but likewise burnt with equal 
vehemence in descent or lateral progress; instead of being ex- 
tinguished, it was nourished and quickened by the element of 
water; and sand or vinegar were the only remedies that could 
damp the fury of this powerful agent, which was justly denomi- 
nated by the Greks the liquid or the maritime fire. For the 
annoyance of the enemy it was employed, with equal effect, 
by sea and land, in battles or in sieges. It was either poured 
from the rampart in large boilers, or launched in red-hot balls 
of stone and iron, or darted in arrows and javelins, twisted round 
with wax and tow, which had deeply imbibed the inflammable 

60 



TOURS 

oil; sometimes it was deposited in fire-ships, the victims and 
instruments of a more ample revenge, and was most commonly 
blown through long tubes of copper which were planted on the 
prow of a galley, and fancifully shaped into the mouths of 
savage monsters, that seemed to vomit a stream of liquid and 
consuming fire," 

The paralyzing effect of fear let loose among a multitude of 
men has decisively determined many a battle. When the Ro- 
mans saw elephants for the first time, and saw them too, in the 
midst of Pyrrhus' hostile hosts bearing down upon them — those 
brave world-conquerors promptly turned and fled. Chariots arm- 
ed with scythes madly rushing down upon a body of infantry, 
were used with success by the Britons against Csesar's terrified 
legions. And Greek Fire, Byzantium's secret for four hundred 
years, infused such enduring terror into the hearts of the na- 
tions that had taken part in that night attack upon Constanti- 
nople, that this remembering fear, rather than the effective 
force of Byzantium, may be said to have saved Christendom. 

By the defeat of Tours in the west and the failure of the 
siege in the east, the two horns of the Crescent, burning into 
Europe, were effectively repulsed and chilled. Mohammedanism 
with its threefold blight — propagation by the sword, polygamy, 
and religious intolerance — was swept back into Asia, leaving 
Europe to develop under the milder sway of Christianity. 

Writers of note are unanimous in attributing to the vic- 
tory of Charles Martel over the Saracens at Tours the deliver- 
ance of Europe from the thraldom of Mahomet. Even Gib- 
bon so characteristically fond of ' ' Snapping a solemn creed with 
solemn sneer" speaks of this battle as "the event that rescued 
our ancestors of Britain and our neighbors of Gaul from the 
civil and religious yoke of the Koran." Arnold speaks of this 
victory as "among those signal deliverances which have effect- 
ed for centuries the happiness of mankind." The historian 

61 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

Ranke writing of this period points out as "one of the most im- 
portant epochs in the history of the world, the commencement 
of the eighth century, when on one side Mohammedanism 
threatened to overspread Italy and Gaul, and on the other the 
ancient idolatry of Saxony and Friesland once more forced its 
way across the Rhine. Tn this peril of Christian institutions, 
a youthful prince of Germanic race, Karl Martell, arose as their 
champion, maintained them with all the energy which the neces- 
sity for self-defense calls forth, and finally extended them into 
new regions." Schlegel, with devoutly grateful heart, tells of 
this "mighty victory whereby the arm of Charles Martel saved 
and delivered the Christian nations of the West from the dead- 
ly grasp of all-destroying Islam." 



62 



Chapter VIII, 

HASTINGS-SENLAC 

"If you can keep your head when all about you 
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you: 
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you 
Yet make allowance for their doubting too. 
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, 
Or being lied about don't deal in lies; 
Or being hated not give way to hating, 
And yet don't seem too good or talk too wise." 

— Kipling. 

If. 

If — laconic f ate -word ! hinge of destiny! // the Persians 
had won at Marathon; and if the brilliant imagination of a 
Persian Herodotus had fixed in fame the glories of conquering 
Persia: if the Pelopenessian War had not mutually destroyed 
the Grecian empire : if Alexander the Great had lost the battles 
Granicus, Issus, Arbela; if world-conquering Alexander the 
Great had been successful in the conquest of his own down- 
dragging human heart, and if he had not died at Babylon, aged 
thirty-two, world-victor and self-victim: if the village by the 
Tiber had not advanced by bloody strides o'er fixed-star battle- 
fields from Rome a wilderness to Rome, Mistress of the World: 
if the barbarous hordes of the North had not ever longingly 
before their eyes the fairyland of southern Europe, the troll- 
gardens of Italy: if Rome had not become enervated; if Gaul 
and Goth and Hun and Norseman had not won : if the Crescent 
had waved victorious o'er a fallen Cross at Tours, Belgrade, 
Lepanto : if William of Normandy son of Robert the Devil, had 
been pierced by an arrow and buried indistinguishably among 
the dead on the slaughter-field of Senlac-Hastings — If! 

63 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

But we are a perennially hopeful race and happily unimag- 
inative and dully content with the Real: and so we unquestion- 
ingly acquiesce when grave historians tell us that in each and 
every historic struggle the juggernaut determinant of the // 
acted favorably to the best interests of civilization and progress : 
so, too, would we obligingly believe had the determinant favored 
the opposing cause. Perhaps to all-conquering Progress as to 
world-conquering Rome, all battles are victories; either as a 
victory proper with roll of triumph-drum and flash of conquer- 
ing colors, or as that grim Cannse-defeat potential of a future 
Zama-victory. 

It is well that there should be two possible interpretations of 
the answers of the oracle: thus is Truth ever serenely secure 
unperturbed by the errors of mortals. 

Pegasus. 

It is hard to control the winged steed. His next flight and 
whereabouts of alighting are as happily unknown to the rider 
as to the beholder — to the writer as to the reader. However 
Pegasus, the real, can never fail to be interesting whether he 
leap over the historic ages, or play antics on an //, or neigh ir- 
reverently in the temple of Delphian Apollo, or speed to the 
finding of Harold Godwin amid the indistiuguishably dead on 
the slaughter-field of Senlac-Hastings. 

RoLLO THE Dane. 

Vikings of the northern seas, wolf-men of the Sagas, dark dev- 
otees of Thor, heirs of Valkirie — little wonder that the semi- 
civilized world shuddered at their distant approach; little 
wonder that Charlemagne, hero of a hundred wars, grew sick 
at heart, foreseeing the rivers of blood that should deluge fair 
France, when, one day, by chance, his eagle gaze caught sight 
of the Dragon-Head long-boats of the Northmen as yet far off, 
red-glittering on shaggy northern seas. 

64 



HASTINGS-SENLAC 

Time passed; the Charlemagne vision had dread realization; 
France, England, Southern Europe were overrun by conquer- 
ing Saxon, Dane, Norsemen. 

And Rollo of Norway, called Rollo the Dane, settled in 
northern France. He named that part of the country Nor- 
mandy in honor of his native land. After many years of 
bloodshed and as advancing age subdued the battle fever, he 
entered into a compromise compact with Charles the Simple of 
France. Rollo was to do homage to the king, be baptized, and 
marry Giselle, the king's daughter: in return he should be 
acknowledged as the lawful Duke of Normandy with right of 
succession to his heirs forever. But rough old Rollo protested 
against the humiliating conditions of the homage ceremony. It 
was obligingly agreed that it should be done by proxy. History 
relates that the warrior appointed as proxy in the homage 
ceremony felt deeply the humiliation of having to kiss the slip- 
pered foot of King Charles and that in this act he rudely raised 
the foot so high that the monarch was unseated and fell from 
his chair. Amid the wild hilarity caused by this scene and the 
seeming revival of barbarism. King Charles was too fearful of 
Rollo to make open complaint: concealing his chagrin he pro- 
ceeded with the ceremony and no doubt felt happily relieved 
when all was over, and Rollo at the head of his wild followers 
stood forth as Robert, the first Duke of Normandy. The bap- 
tism and the marriage followed in due succession and thus 
was won over and fixed in civilization, Christianity, and historic 
fame Rollo the Dane, forefather of six dukes of Normandy, and 
of a long line of English kings extending directly or indirectly 
from William the Conqueror to Queen Anne, last of the Stuarts. 

William op Normandy. 

William was the son of Robert, sixth duke of Normandy: 
William's mother was Arlotte, a peasant girl, daughter of a 

65 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

humble tanner of Falaise. William was reared at the court 
of his father, and being a beautiful and precocious boy as well as 
heir apparent of the realm, he became a great favorite among 
the warrior courtiers of Duke Robert. 

The magic of danger, the lure of the unknown, the glamour 
of romance and chivalry lay, at that time, in a pilgrimage to the 
Holy Land. Thither turned the eyes of the half-civilized 
descendants of the savage old Vikings; and, as the war fever 
of youth abated, many men, combining incongruously remorse 
for crimes and pentinential expiation with love of daring ad- 
venture, turned away from strong feudal castles and lordly 
possessions in Europe to brave the hardships and uncertainties 
of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Among those thus lured 
into fatal uncertainties was Robert le Diable, sixth Duke of 
Normandy. He left the realm to his son William — if by chance 
he himself should not return — appointed Alan of Brittany re- 
gent during William's minority, and having left the boy safe 
at the court of Henry of France, Robert set out on that pilgrim- 
age to the Holy Land from which he never returned. 

Ever insatiably hungry is the heart of man. Pleasure is a 
mirage. Yet perhaps, happier is it to fall and perish in full 
pursuit of an ever receding pleasure than to walk inane in the 
beaten sand-way and — live. To do is easier than to endure : 
to act is easier than to wait; to roam abroad and strive is 
easier than to stay at home and pray; to wander amid strange 
scenes and stranger men, to draw the approving sword in a 
cause approved, to fight and die and leave his bones to bleach 
on Asiatic plains were easier far for Rollo's blood than to 
wait and waste away secure in a feudal fortress of Normandy. 

At Robert's death there were various claimants to his pos- 
sessions; but, finally, owing, in great measure, to the fidelity of 
the regent Allan of Brittany, the dukedom was secured for 
William. He left the court of Paris, and soon after, taking full 

66 



HASTINGS-SENLAC 

possession of the realm, he began to exhibit those indomitable 
character qualifications which together with his military educa- 
tion and robust physical powers led him on from conquest to 
conquest even unto the tragic culmination at Senlac -Hastings 
from which he came forth blood-baptized as William the Con- 
queror. 

The Lady Emma, Pearl op Normandy. 

"When Ethelred, the Saxon King of England, fled from his 
realm and left it to the victorious Danes, he sought refuge at 
the court of Richard, the fourth duke of Normandy. There he 
met and married the Lady Emma, sister of Duke Richard. This 
lady was famed for her beauty and known throughout the realm 
as the Pearl of Normandy. 

Edward of England, known in England as Edward the Con- 
fessor, was the son of Ethelred and Lady Emma; and it was 
upon this relationship that William, at the time of Edward's 
death, laid claim to the crown. Whatever may be said of this 
claim, it was at least more tangible than that of Harold, son of 
Earl Godwin. 

The days have gone by when the rights of blood relationship 
were claims for which contending realms might squander for- 
tunes and armies: but he who estimates the ages past by the 
standards of today, would better roll up and read no more the 
enigmatic scrolls of history. Rivers of blood have freely flowed 
in order that some royal rascal, slightly richer in royal rascality 
than a rival claimant, might win a throne. Yet we who can- 
not understand the code of the Samurai, as worked out logically 
today; we to whom the principles of Bushido, when carried to 
the last full measure of devotion, are fascinatingly unreal; we 
to whom jun-shi, hari-kiri, seppuku are words ominous, indeed, 
but unintelligible even when translated into deed in the white 

67 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

light of today* — ^how shall we be able to understand or estimate 
aright the mysteries of the mighty past! 

So upon this faint claim of relationship, William, the seventh 
duke of Normandy, nephew of Lady Emma, Queen of England, 
founded his right to the English throne : and for better or worse, 
right or wrong, faint claim or no claim — he won. 

Matilda of Flanders. 

William sought to strengthen his position by an influential 
matrimonial alliance. Matilda, daughter of the Duke of 
Flanders, became the object of his choice. This lady was very 
beautiful and an adept in the accomplishments of her time — 
music and tapestry weaving. In fact a wonderful piece of 
tapestry known as the Bayeaux Tapestry and even now in a 
state of comparative preservation, is said to have been the work 
of Matilda of Flanders, wife of William the Conqueror. This 
famous piece of embroidery on linen is four hundred feet long 
and nearly two feet wide; it is a series of designs illustrating 
the various events and incidents of the Battle of Hastings and 
other exploits of the Conqueror. 

William and Matilda were married in 1052, the Battle of 
Hastings was fought in 1066, so that the Bayeaux Tapestry has 
resisted the gnawing tooth of time for more than eight hundred 
years. 

Who shall unerringly perceive in the glare of the passing day, 
what is great, what small: what is enduring, what evancescent! 
Linen fibres, silken threads, a woman's needlework — endure: 
shields, helmets, swords, battle axes, all the iron horrors of Hast- 
ings have passed away. 

And the moral values of the passing hour are, to human per- 
ception, equally elusive, intangible, untraceable. But are we 
called upon to understand the full meaning of the passing show? 

•Death of General Nogi. 



HASTINGS-SENLAC 

Surely the Power above us smiles at our endeavors to fit together 
here in Time things whose fitness shall not have developed in a 
thousand years. 

The old Norse story runs that when Thor went to Jotun-heim, 
the home of the Gianta, he failed ignominiously in the accomp- 
lishments of the tasks imposed upon him. He struck with might 
and main at the head of the prostrate giant Skrymir, but the 
huge creature only moved restlessly and murmured in his sleep 
that a leaf or twig had fallen upon his face. Thor failed in the 
race with Hugi. Thor failed in the drinking bout proposed by 
Utgard-Loki. Thor failed in the wresting match with EUi, the 
old nurse of Utgard-Loki. Thor failed to lift the Giant's sleep- 
ing cat, and though he tugged with all his strength, he suc- 
ceeded in lifting only one paw from the ground. Thor failed 
apparently in every task that was set before him. 

But, behold! when revelation was made, it was found that 
Thor had, indeed, been Thor and that his failure-achievements 
had terrified even the Norns. For the giant Skrymir later con- 
fessed to Thor that by magic he had shielded his head with a 
mountain when Thor struck with his hammer, and that the 
mountain had been well nigh severed by the blow. And as to 
the race with Hugi, why Hugi is Thought; and no man may 
hope to surpass the speed of thought. And as to Thor's failure 
in the drinking bout, why the drinking horn had been secretly 
in connection with the ocean, and Thor's deep draughts had 
seriously lowered old ocean's vast domain. And as to Elli, the 
nurse, why she was Old Age and her no mortal may overcome. 
And as to Thor's failure to lift the sleeping cat — why the seem- 
ing cat had been in dread reality, the Midgard serpent coiled 
around the world, and his nearly successful efforts to rouse the 
serpent and tear it from the charmed circle, had terrified even 
the Noms. And so Thor was still Thor in his failure-achieve- 
ments in Jotun-heim : so likewise may we, in the great Revelation, 

69 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

be found to have been splendid conquerors in the grim failure- 
strife of Time. And then, too, shall a fateful Skrymir make 
known to us the true nature of the forces against which we 
strove; the fatal necessity of failure in such a strife, were we 
Thor or even Odin: then too shall we learn with astonishment 
and delight the Herculean results of our labors ; and throughout 
all the upward cycles of our immortality we shall be stronger 
and better because of our failure-achievements down in earth's 
Jotun-heim. 

Monasteries. 

As there was some tie of consanguinity between William and 
Matilda, their marriage could take place only by special dis- 
pensation from the Pope. After some vexatious delays, how- 
ever, this dispensation was obtained, but William and Matilda 
were advised by the Pope to erect a Hospital for incurable 
patients and two monasteries, one for men, the other for women. 

William and Matilda joyfully agreed to fulfill these condi- 
tions. The hospital was built first, and later two imposing 
monastic piles, one under the special patronage of Matilda, the 
other under William, were erected at Caen. Strange to relate 
that after forty or fifty years had passed away, Matilda was 
brought to her wedding monument monastery and quietly in- 
terred, and a few years later William was laid to rest in his 
wedding monument monastery. And thus near yet apart they 
have slept thro' the long ages. 

Harold Godwin. 

Harold Godwin and William of Normandy were not strangers 
to each other when they drew up their battle forces on the field 
of Senlac-Hastings. Harold had spent some months in Nor- 
mandy at the court of William some years prior to the death of 
Edward. And William had made known to Harold his claim 

70 



HASTINGS-SENLAC 

to the English throne and his intention of maintaining that claim 
when the time should come. History relates that Harold, con- 
cealing his own ambitious designs, vowed solemnly to support 
William's cause. 

At the death of Edward, however, Harold found himself at 
the head of a powerful Saxon faction and felt strong enough 
to oppose William, should he persist in his intent to claim the 
throne. 

But what about that oath made solemnly in the presence of 
the Sacrament! Is a man ever courageously self-respecting 
and invincibly valiant in whose soul festers the ulcer — perjury ! 
When Richard the Third went forth to battle upon Bosworth 
field, he was already defeated and slain by his own avenging 
conscience. 

When Harold heard of the landing of William's Norman 
troops at Pevensey, he was then in the north of England 
engaged in a struggle with the Danes under the leadership 
of his own brother Tostig. Harold was slightly wounded in this 
battle but, in the end, Tostig lay dead upon the field and the 
Danes were put to flight. Thus from a battlefield red with a 
brother's blood, Harold, a wounded man and a perjured man 
hastened southward to his fate in the dread slaughter of Hast- 
ings. 

"And were things only called by their right name, 
Caesar himself would be ashamed of fame." — Byron. 

The word battlefield is a euphemism for human shambles. And 
"the chief who in triumph advances" is, in grim reality, but 
the lustiest and the bloodiest of the dogs of war. And the 
Alexanders, Csesars, Napoleons are the madmen who have made 
men mad by their contagion, and have so accumulated horrors 
Pelion-Ossa piled on horrors as to make the angels weep o'er 
this mad planet of the universe. 

A forceful peculiarity of mental unsoundness is the vehem- 

71 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

ence with which its victim conceives himself to be right and 
everybody else wrong, himself sane and all not in agreement 
with him insane. This fatuity is characteristic of ages as well 
as of individuals. It is manifest in the complaisant superiority 
which every age, every generation assumes toward the immedi- 
ately preceding. "Back in the past, during the Dark Ages, 
in primitive times, etc." are the words of balm with which the 
passing hour begins its own eulogy. 

But blood is blood and hate is hate and war is war, whether 
waged by Macedonian Alexander B. C. 331, or by the Balkan 
forces A. D. 1912. Shades of the fallen upon that age-long 
battle ground ! wouldn 't you feel strangely at home in the fray 
if by any chance you should come to life today? 

International courts of justice, arbitration, disarmament, 
World-Peace — will they ever prevail ? Knowing the past, know- 
ing the heart of man, we answer No : dreaming of the future, 
dreaming of the godlike in the heart of man, we answer Yes. 

So all day long the tide of battle rolled — from early day 
till dark. And William and his Norman followers were in pos- 
session of the field, and round them lay a host of dead and wound- 
ed, yet by reason of the sudden darkness and the exhaustion of 
the troops, no search could be made even for the Norman 
wounded: and tho' groans and cries of thirst and deep sigh- 
ings arose incessantly from the writhing masses just darker than 
the darkness, yet no search could be made or any aid given 
by reason of the utter exhaustion of the troops. 

And on that field of death and awfully dying life Harold 
Godwin lay happily dead under a heap of the slain. Two 
monks, lanterns in hand, went out to search for him and with 
them went also the mother of Harold and Edith the woman that 
loved him. After hours of fruitless search amid scenes of grue- 
some horror, and as the dawn burst in red wonder over a bleed- 
ing world, Edith discovered Harold. So changed was he, so 

72 



HASTINGS-SENLAC 

mutilated, hacked and hewed, blood-clotted, dismembered, that 
even his mother knew him not but the woman that loved him 
knew. With great difficulty was the body of Harold extri- 
cated from under the heap of the slain, but the monks and the 
women persevered at their task and finally bore him away. 

William the Conqueror. 

We know only what life has brought within our own cogni- 
tion; beyond that all is conjecture. The love turned to hate 
and delighting in the avenging pangs of a lover is utterly un- 
cognizable by the man or woman unto whom love is love forever- 
more. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's weird poem ''Sister Helen" is, 
thank God, quite meaningless to the greater number of women: 
and yet such women as Sister Helen exist ; they know each other ; 
they understand the poem. 

Strange, indeed, was that practice among primitive people, 
of injuring an image of an enemy and claiming that thereby, 
in like manner, they injured the enemy. In the poem referred 
to, the woman is engaged in the magic rite of holding a waxen 
image in the flame and letting it slowly consume under in- 
cantation. She is interrupted from time to time by her wond- 
ering little brother, and in her answers to him Helen makes 
known her wrongs, her slighted love, her love turned to hate, 
her revenge, her vindictive madness, her black-art vengeance 
reaching even beyond the grave, her triumph-despair. At the 
end of the incantation as for the seventh time she turns the 
waxen figure and it breaks up and melts dripping away — her 
perjured lover dies. 

A formula of this magic rite runs as follows: 
"Take parings, nails, hair, saliva, etc., of your victim and 
make them up into his likeness with wax from a deserted bees' 

73 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

comb. Hold the waxen image in slow flame for seven consecu- 
tive nights repeating intently over the image — 

'It is not wax that I am scorching, 
It is the liver, heart, spleen of So and So.' 

After the seventh time, turn your figure and your victim's 
life will go out with the last drippings of the wax into the 
flame." 

Gladly would we relegate this grotesque rite back to the 
twilight of animistic superstitions: but if we are vitally in 
touch both with the pa-st and with the passing hour, we dare not 
do so. There is subtle relationship between this concretely 
hideous formula of other days and such abstract expressions — 
not unfamiliar today — as mental assassination, use of malicious 
animal magnetism, hypjiotic control of the aura, aggressive tele- 
pathic forces, etc. The garb of the occult changes, adapts itself 
with Protean pliability to the passing hour — but the inscrutable 
Occult forever hid behind the Isis-veil, does not change. 

It is said of Moliere that behind the mask of comedy, he bore 
a heart heavy with tragic woe: that his farces are satires on 
human nature : that he, more piercingly than any other mortal, 
had gazed down into the heart of man. Perhaps for 
Moliere then, or such as he, the all around understanding 
of every act or emotion is sympathetically possible, but to the 
ordinary mortal there is full knowledge only of that which has 
come within his own cognition. 

Therefore, to depict the feelings of William the Conqueror, 
as he stood among the dead and dying on the field of Hastings is 
beyond the power of ordinary mortal. Whether he felt elated 
or depressed — for we know that ofttimes in the hour of seeming 
triumph there is deadly depression of soul; whether he turned 
heartsick from the reproachful glare in dead and dying eyes 
and shuddered that such things should be, or gazed delightedly 

74 



HASTINGS-SENLAC 

and eagerly upon the sullen silent faces of the Saxon foe: 
whether with infinite pity regretful and remorseful he could 
have wept for the brave men who lay dead because of him, or 
saw them not at all, or, at best, only as stepping stones to a 
throne: who shall say? who shall know? 

When a man as stoically severe as the late General Nogi, 
has by chance been revealed to the world as a tender father 
and a man weighed down by fatal woe even whilst he was urg- 
ing on the furiously victorious death-charges up the hill of 
Port Arthur — we would willingly suspend judgment as to what 
may have been the feelings in the hour of triumph deep down 
in the heart of William the Conqueror. 

Robert's Rebellion. 

William had left his wife Matilda as regent of Normandy 
when he set out for the invasion of England. Robert, the 
eldest boy, a bright lad of fourteen and his mother's idol was 
also participant in the regency. As the years rolled by and 
the boy grew more able and willing to rule, Matilda willingly 
sank to second place in active government and Robert was 
in deed if not in title the Duke of Normandy. 

Eight years passed by before William found his English 
realm calm enough for him to leave it and make a visit to his 
old home Normandy. At his coming he found all going on 
admirably without him. Matilda was happy in the affection of 
her favorite son Robert; and Robert a valiant young prince, 
was happy in the love of an over-indulgent mother and the pos- 
session of ducal power. All this was changed when William 
came. Perhaps jealousy of the place Robert held in the 
affections of Matilda, perhaps insatiable avarice and lust of 
power, perhaps unnatural hatred of the son who dared to op- 
pose the unconquerable will of the Conqueror — perhaps any or 

75 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

all of these feelings intermingling impelled William to act as 
he did, but certainly, in the light of calmer times, William's 
conduct towards his son Robert cannot be justified. 

Robert was deposed from the place which he held during 
the regency and which he had slowly grown to regard as his 
own. The proud spirit of the princely youth could not endure 
this humiliation. He fled to Flanders, and there among 
his mother's friends and his own followers and retainers, he 
gathered together an army and appeared in open rebellion 
against his father. 

Matilda was, indeed, a devoted wife to William, but she was 
an even more devoted mother to her son; and her heart was 
torn with grief when hostilities broke out and father and son 
were arrayed against each other on the field of battle. It is 
related that Robert saved William's life in the engagement that 
followed. Both were in armor and their faces were concealed 
by the helmet and visor, so that they did not recognize one 
another. In the heat of the strife, Robert saw one of his knights 
hurl a javelin at a burly figure on horseback in the opposing 
ranks. With a cry and a groan the injured man fell from 
his horse, and Robert horrified at the voice which he recog- 
nized as his father's, rushed headlong to the side of the fallen 
man and rescued him from the feet of trampling horses. He 
was touched with remorse and wept as WiUiam uplifted his 
helmet and visor revealing a face white and weary and cover- 
ed with blood. 

The generous neart of the youth even then might have been 
won to better things had William himself been morally high 
enough to draw his son higher; but he was not. 

That hasty action and as hasty reaction in the hearts of the 
young-world children — hate surging suddenly into remorseful 
love, strength into weakness, audacious rebellion into repentant 

76 



HASTINGS-SENLAC 

submission: and then as hastily surging back again! Robert 
saving the life of his father against whom he had come in battle 
array: Richard Coeur de Lion bitterly weeping at the bier of 
his father whose death he had desired and hastened: Henry I. 
who never smiled again after the loss of his son and heir when 
the White Ship went down : the Black Prince, chivalrously sub- 
servient to his prisoner King John of France conquered at 
Portiers — strangely fascinating is this hasty action and reaction 
in the hearts of the young- world children ! 

Matilda succeeded in bringing about a reconciliation between 
her husband and her son after that strange battle ; but it was 
only for a time. William was compelled to return to Eng- 
land and Robert took advantage of this occasion to enforce his 
claim on Normandy. Matilda was secretly in favor of her son 
( the women are always right ! ) tho ' she tried to conciliate both. 
Rebellion again raged in Normandy openly carried on by 
Robert and secretly abetted by Matilda. William was, at the 
same time, threatened with an uprising in England and was 
obliged to remain on the island. But certainly there could 
have been little peace or happiness in the heart of the man 
whose subjects were in insurrection against him and in whose 
household there was hate and discord and rebellion. 

As William became more and more alienated from Robert, 
he looked more favorably upon his second son William Rufus 
and his third son Henry. These in turn succeeded him upon 
the throne of England to the exclusion of Robert, the rightful 
heir. 

Robert languished in prison the last twenty-seven years of 
his life — thus adding ^mother chapter to the book in which is 
recorded the story of men and women who have nearly suc- 
ceeded in their ambitious designs — but not quite: the Almosts 
of literature and of life; who have struggled fear- 
fully and failed; whose fierce activities have died down in 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

dungeon gloom ; who have been, in the main, more sinned against 
than sinning; who have lived and happily died leaving behind 
a tragic name flame-cut into fame. 

Exeunt Omnes. 

Matilda died in 1082, and about five years later William fol- 
lowed her to the tomb. Matilda died in the palace part of the 
monastery at Csen erected by William at the time of their mar- 
riage. Her last days were deeply shadowed by the renewal 
of hostilities between William and Robert, and by the death of a 
daughter, a young and beautiful girl full of hope and promise, 
who had suddenly been stricken with an incurable illness. 

It was well that in those days in the twilight of the grave, 
Matilda could not foresee the sad fate of her son Robert. 
Little did that tender mother-heart dream of the destiny over- 
hanging the boy, when at that last clandestine interview she 
hastily blessed him and kissed him good bye. Thank God for 
the heavy curtain rolled down impenetrably between the present 
and the future. 

William, notwithstanding his grievance against Matilda, came 
to see her in her last illness. He was with her when she died. 
He followed her in the funeral cortege to that monastery built 
by her in far off happier days, and he stood sadly by as that 
devoted vidfe and mother of his many children was laid to rest. 

Philip of France abetted the cause of Robert, and William, 
now an old man and grown excessively corpulent, was forced 
again to take up arms. William was under medical treatment for 
his corpulency, and Philip, hearing of this, jestingly remarked 
that "the old woman of England was in the straw." A tale- 
bearer repeated this to William and in a rage the King swore 
that ' ' the old woman of England would soon make things too hot 
for him." William kept his word; burning villages and war 

78 



HASTINGS-SENLAC 

horrors arose on every side as the irate monarch began his 
march of revenge. 

The town of Mantes, on the road to Paris, was in flames, 
and William, riding thro' and giving out orders in all direc- 
tions, failed to notice that his horse was treading upon smok- 
ing ashes. Suddenly the horse reared violently, his feet evi- 
dently having been burnt by smouldering flame, and William 
was internally injured. He was borne by litter to a mon- 
astery just outside the gates of Rouen. William soon realized 
that he was face to face with the King of Terrors. He shrank 
with horror from the remembrance of his deeds : he ordered that 
a large sum of money should be given to the poor and that 
their prayers should be enlisted in his behalf; he gave orders 
that all the churches of Mantes, destroyed by him, should be 
at once rebuilt, and he richly endowed the monastery. 

His sons William and Henry were soon at his side, but 
Robert came not. When asked as to whom he bequeathed the 
kingdom of England he replied that it had not been bequeathed 
to him, that, therefore, he bequeathed it to no one, but that he 
wished that his son William Rufus might succeed him. 

William, at last, when he could hold it no longer, left Nor- 
mandy to his eldest son Robert. 

William tried to make his peace with Heaven as the dread 
summons came nearer and nearer. He was one morning sud- 
denly aroused from a comatose state by the ringing of the 
church bells. Hastily arising and thinking himself in the clash 
of battle he demanded to know what that clangor meant. On 
being told that it was the church bells of St. Mary's ringing for 
morning services, he lifted up his hands, turned his eyes heaven- 
ward, and exclaimed, ' ' I commend myself to my Lady Mary, 
the holy Mother of God." He then sank back and died. 

William Rufus succeeded to the throne of England and 
after a troubled reign of thirteen years, he died. 

79 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

Henry, the youngest son of William the Conqueror, claimed 
the crown and after overcoming his brother Robert in a ter- 
rible battle, he quietly took possession of the throne. Robert 
was held a prisoner by Henry I. until death released him twenty- 
seven years later. 

So long ago were these scenes enacted, and so very long 
have the actors slumbered! Would they recognize themselves 
in the descriptions given of them today? and would they be 
pleased or displeased with the parts attributed to them in the 
play? 

However all the actors, immediate and mediate, connected 
with the battle of Senlac-Hastings have long ago gone off the 
stage. The colossal // upon which once hung the history of 
England has become fate-fixed actuality. The Houses of Plan- 
tagenet, Lancaster, York, Tudor, Stuart — England's story from 
1066 to the passing hour are inseparably woven one with the 
battle of Senlac-Hastings and the // determinant in favor of 
William the Conqueror. 



m 



Chapter IX. 

ORLEANS 

What France won in three years (1428-1431) under the 
leadership of Joan of Arc restored all that France had lost 
during the Hundred Years' War. Cressy, Poitiers, Agincourt 
were negatived by Orleans. 

More wonderful than any myth of any nation under the 
sun, than any concept of poetic fancy throughout all literatures, 
than any vision of poet-sage or seer in all Sybilline rhapsodies 
— is the plain historical narrative of the life and deeds of Joan 
of Arc. Some power beyond the natural worked thro' the 
peasant maid of Domremy. 

"The people of Orleans when they first saw her in their 
city thought that it was an angel from Heaven that had come 
down to save them", said an eye-witness of the scene who 
testified at the reversal of Jeanne's sentence ten years after her 
death. On the contrary the Duke of Bedford, in a letter still 
extant, writing to Henry VI. and lamenting recent disasters to 
the English army says : ' ' And alle thing there prospered for you 
til the tyme of the Siege of Orleans taken in hand God knoweth 
by what advis. 

"At the which tyme, after the adventure fallen to the per- 
son of my cousin of Salisbury, whom God assoile, there fell by 
the hand of God as it seemeth, a great strook upon your peuple 
that was assembled there in grete nombre, caused in great part 
as I trowe, of lakke of sadde beleve, and of unlevefull doubte, 
that they had of a disciple and limb of the Feende, called the 
Pucelle, that used fals enchantments and sorcerie." 

"So certainly 
As morn returneth in her radiant light 
Infallibly the day of truth shall come" 

said the Maid of Orleans. 

81 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

That day of truth has come. Around Joan of Are the 
charmed circle of the Church of Rome is drawn. Let no man 
dare to call evil that which the Church calls good; let no man 
dare to attribute imposture, hysterical exaltation, or jiecro- 
mantic might to one whom the Church calls Blessed. Vindi- 
cated, rehabilitated, restored, cherished. Blessed is now the 
Maid who died five hundred years ago burned at the stake as a 
witch. 

Condemned by the University of Paris, an ecclesiastical 
tribunal? Yes. Hounded to the stake by Pierre Cauchon, 
Bishop of Beauvais? Yes. But the Church can shake off and 
disclaim the clinging hands of her children whose touch pollutes 
her; and the Church of all ages can outshine the lurid dark- 
ness of any one age, and deprecate, and deplore and denounce 
the deeds done in that lurid darkness. Splendidly, too, and 
with stern magnanimity, defying apparent self-contradiction, 
can the Church reverse the decrees of ecclesiastical tribunals, 
and stoop down to pick up and restore and rehabilitate and 
bless a strangely foolish child whom kings and courts and the 
great University of Paris had condemned and cast away. 

The Church of the Middle Ages must ever stand darkly 
enigmatic to the non- Catholic student of history. He cannot 
rightly appreciate the binding force of spiritual authority. The 
withering away from fear of Church censure, the clinging claim 
upon all the powers of the soul in the prayers and ceremonies 
and sacraments of the Church, the isolating horrors of her ex- 
communications, the abject fear of her spiritual punishments, 
powerful alike over prince and potentate and peasant — are 
practically meaningless to the non-Catholic. 

That scene in "Richelieu" by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, 
well illustrates the power of the Church in the Middle Ages. 
King Louis XIII. has sent to demand that Julie de Mortemar, 
Cardinal Richelieu's orphan ward, shall be immediately sent to 

82 



ORLEANS 

the court subject to the king's pleasure. The girl clings to the 
Cardinal for protection. To these messengers Cardinal Riche- 
lieu replies, 

"To those who sent you!— 
And say you found the virtue they would slay 
Here — couched upon this heart, as at an altar. 
And sheltered by the wings of sacred Rome. 
Begone !" 

They go. But soon again comes Baradas, favorite of the 
king, First Gentleman of the Chamber, and about to be made 
premier to succeed the temporarily deposed Cardinal Richelieu. 
To Baradas' insolent importunities the eloquent old Cardinal 
in righteous wrath exclaims: 

"Ay, is it so? — 
Then wakes the power which in the age of iron 
Burst forth to curb the great and raise the low. 
Mark where she stands ! — around her form I draw 
The awful circle of our solemn Church ! 
Set but a foot within that holy ground, 
And on thy head— yea tho' it wore a crown 
I launch the curse of Rome!" 

Baradas abashed retires, the king's suit ceases; the Church 
has triumphed. 

La Pucelle. 

France is assuredly a genius-mad nation: whether genius or 
madness shall ultimately prevail is an answerless question. The 
Republic shall go down in "a slough of mire and blood" is the 
current prophecy today; but, then, France has gone down in 
mire and blood many and many a time and, phoenix like, she has 
risen and soared aloft led onward and upward by some strong 
Genius-Child. 

Joan of Arc and Napoleon Bonaparte stand unique in his- 
tory; each picked up torn, bleeding, fragmentary France and 
restored her to her rightful place in the family of nations. 

83 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

That Napoleon Bonaparte, a man, a soldier, and a master of 
opportune occasion, should have rescued France is not wonder- 
ful; but that the Maid of Domremy, a timid girl aged seven- 
teen, who "knew not how to ride or to handle a sword", whose 
hand never shed blood, should have, amid most inopportune oc- 
casion, prevailed in battle against Talbot, Gladsdale, Falstofe 
and the flower of the English Army is, past all credence, wonder- 
ful. 

France as a nation was extinguished by the Treaty of Troyes. 
Isabeau of Bavaria, wife of Charles VI. deliberately and ex- 
ultantly aided the trembling hand of the imbecile king as he 
signed away his kingdom. Henry VI. of England, infant son 
of Henry V. and Catharine, daughter of Charles VI. of France, 
was proclaimed heir of the united kingdoms France and Eng- 
land: later, at the death of Henry V. this child was crowned 
at Paris king of England and of France. Isabeau of Bavaria 
aided in the coronation ceremony, graciously accepting young 
Harry Lancaster as king of France to the exclusion of the 
rightful heir, her own son, Charles the dauphin. 

As Schiller says : 

"Even the murderotis bands 
Of the Burgundians, at this spectacle 

Evinced some token of indignant shame. 
The queen perceived it and addressed the crowds, 

Exclaiming with loud voice, 'Be grateful, Frenchmen, 
That I engraft upon a sickly stock 

A healthy scion, and redeem you from 
The misbegotten son of a mad sire." 

Surely the first part of Merlin's prophecy had been ominous- 
ly fulfilled : France was lost by a woman. Would a woman 
save France? And far away — among the wooded hills of 
Domremy wandered the splendid Dreamer who should, in three 
bright, bitter years — flame-cut into fame forever — undo what 
Isabeau had done, throw off the incubus of alien authority, nega- 
tive the Treaty of Troyes, and save France. 

84 



ORLEANS 

Thank God for the enthusiasts, for those who follow their 
Voices ! Tho ' their way lies thro ' adamantine opposition, they 
know it not, their eyes are fixed on the goal; and even as one 
in hypnotic somnambulism leaps on from toppling crag to crag 
unaw^ed by the sheer depths of yawning destiny o'er which he 
strides, so do these enthusiasts press on to the goal: and they 
reach it. 

" Joan appeared at the camp at Blois, clad in a new suit 
of brilliant white armor, mounted on a stately black war-horse, 
and with a lance in her right hand, which she had learned to 
wield M'ith skill and grace. Her head was unhelmeted; so that 
all could behold her fair and expressive features, her deep-set 
and earnest eyes, and her long black hair, which was parted 
across her forehead and bound by a ribbon behind her back. 
She wore at her side a small battle-axe, and the consecrated 
sword marked on the blade with five crosses which had at her 
bidding been taken for her from the shrine of St. Catharine at 
Fierbois. 

A page carried her banner which she had caused to be 
made and embroidered as her Voices enjoined. It was white 
satin, strewn with fleurs-de-lis; and on it were the words "Jhesus 
Maria". And thus spectacularly equipped Joan made her ap- 
pearance at Orleans at the head of an enthusiastic French army. 
The astounded English soldiers could only stare and glare; 
and had it not been from their greater fear of their irate com- 
manders, these brave heroes of Agincourt would have promptly 
run away in panic fright from this dread Maid. 

Joan advanced towards the besiegers and solemnly admon- 
ished the English generals to desist from their unlawful hold- 
ing of Orleans, to withdraw at once from France, and to spare 
further bloodshed. Oaths and imprecations and ribald jests 
answered her earnest abjuration. Joan returned to her ranks 
and gave order for battle. Yet she shrank from the fury of the 

85 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

strife and her heart recoiled and sickened at the sight of 
suffering and death. Joan's most trustworthy biographer tells 
us that her own hand never shed blood. 

Joan was wounded at the battle around Orleans; an arrow 
from a cross-bow penetrated her armor between the neck and 
shoulder and remained fastened in the wound. Joan grew faint 
from pain and she suffered La Hire to lead her from the fray. 
Recovering herself in a little while, she sat up and withdrew 
the arrow with her own hands, then putting a little oil on the 
wound, she mounted and galloped back to where the battle was 
raging. Joan's presence reinspired her followers; mad dash 
after dash was made against the fort held by Sir John Glads- 
dale. The English soldiers, thinking her to have been mortally 
wounded, were terrified at her abrupt return. Again Joan 
called out to Gladsdale to surrender and spare further blood- 
shed. With an oath the infuriated general came out upon the 
drawbridge shouting orders for a final desperate assault. As 
he stood thus conspicuous between the two armies, a cannon 
ball from the town crashed thro' the drawbridge and Gladsdale 
fell and perished in the waters. At the sight of this disaster, 
and also at the attack upon the fort under the leadership of 
Joan in person, the English army fled. The siege of Orleans 
was raised. The long imprisoned Orleannais came forth and 
hailed Joan as their deliverer sent from Heaven. 

Charles VII. 

The raising of the siege of Orleans was quickly followed 
by the decisive battle of Patay in which Talbot, the English 
commander, was wounded and taken prisoner together with a 
large part of the English army. The way now lay open to 
Rheims. Thither marched the victorious French forces under 
Joan of Arc carrying with them the perplexed and irresolute 
Dauphin. In the cathedral at Rheims, July 17, 1429, with all 

86 



ORLEANS 

the solemn ceremonies of the coronation of kings, this weak- 
ling was crowned Charles VII. of France. 

Perhaps as the son of an imbecile sire and Isabeau of Bavaria, 
Charles VII. couldn't help being what he was. So in the shadow 
of that comfortable Lombrosian theory we leave without reproach 
the man whom, in the good sunlight of common sense and honest 
manhood, we should scathingly reproach as dastard and ingrate. 

After the crowning of Charles at Rheims, Joan desired to 
withdraw from the king 's service and go back to Domremy. She 
declared that her work was done; she, moreover, maintained 
that her Voices no longer urged her to remain in the field, or 
pointed out unerringly just what she should do. Du Nois and 
La Hire prevailed upon her to remain with the army. 

Joan was wounded in an unsuccessful attack upon Paris. 
And the following spring in a sortie at Compeigne Joan was 
taken prisoner by the Burgundians and subsequently sold to the 
English. 

Joan was cast into prison at Rouen. Here the indignities 
to which she was subjected, as related by her biographers, are 
almost incredible. The apathy of the fickle French towards 
their late "deliverer sent from Heaven", and the dastardly in- 
difference of Charles VII. during her imprisonment and through- 
out her trial and death form a conspicuous page in the black 
book of Human Ingratitude. 

Et tu, Brute! (And thou too, Brutus!) cried Caesar as he 
fell pierced, indeed, with twenty-three wounds, but slain at the 
sight of his beloved Brutus among the murderers. That was 
death in death. And if my enemy had done this to me, verily, 
I could have iorne it. But thou, my friend and my familiar! — 
This agonizing cry — shrieked so that all the world may hear by 
Cffisar, Wolsey, Joan — rises in bitter silence in many a heart. 
Only those we love have power to wound us; and we 
stand defenceless, unresenting, dim-wondering, yet loving. 
Nancy of the slums under the murderous blows of Bill Sykes, 

87 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

Caesar as he gazes at Brutus, Joan of Arc blessing Charles VII. 
from her Calvary of flames — shine as radiant silhouettes of hu- 
man nobility on the somber overshadowing background of hu- 
man ingratitude. 

Joan's Voices. 

"This pure, this gentle creature cannot lie ! 
No, if enchantment binds me, 'tis from Heaven 
My spirit tells me she is sent from God." — Schiller. 

Both the French and the English firmly believed that Joan 
of Arc was aided by some preternatural power; but was she 
borne upward by "airs from heaven or blasts from hell"? 
Burned at the stake as a Witch, Relapsed Heretic, Accurst — 
thus died the Maid whom the Church has raised to her altars. 

But ere we too scathingly condemn that scene, disgraceful 
alike to the Church and to human nature, which was enacted 
in the Rouen market-place May 31, 1531 ; it might be weU to 
turn a balancing gaze upon our own Cotton Mather madness 
which had its orgies upon Gallows Hill, Salem, June-Septem- 
ber 1692. Nor are we of the passing day and hour sufficiently 
washed white of the soot of Occultism that we may conspicuous- 
ly disclaim the witch-burning at Rouen. In the late Christian 
Science rupture accusations of "mental assassination" and the 
use of "malicious animal magnetism" were mutually charged. 
Just what that may mean in the esoteric circle, I know not; 
but full meaning and full knowledge would doubtless ramify 
back to Rouen. 

"There are m.ore things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamed of in your philosophy." 

Yes, infinitely more: all that the human eye can see or 
the ear hear or the intellect know is but as a shore-lapping wave 
of the infinite ocean of the Seen, the Heard, the Known. And 
what if some eye be abnormally endowed with vision, or some 



ORLEANS 

ear be attuned beyond the normal for hearing, or some finely 
fashioned intellect transcend ordinary knowing — shall it not 
inevitably see more or hear more or know more of that infinite 
ocean? and shall it not fearlessly and fully make known what 
it sees or hears or knows? And then what? Why we gre- 
garious Little People, spitefully content in limitations, will with 
consenting conscience, condemn the witch to death. 

Joan's Voices spoke to her more especially when the church 
bells were ringing; they were mild and very kind; they always 
spoke soothingly. When their music stilled she lay prostrate 
upon the ground and wept because they had left her behind; 
because she had not been able to ascend with them and go 
home to that waiting Heaven. Joan's Voices urged her to 
become the saviour of France. And when the child remon- 
strated that she was only a poor peasant girl and did not 
know how to ride a horse or handle a sword, the Voices in- 
sistently replied, "It is God who commands." And then the 
Maid arose and went forth on that mighty mission. 

Orleans, Jargeau, Troyes, Patay, Rheims, Laon, Soissons, 
Compeigne, Beauvias were her victories. Then came the rapid 
flame-way of her own emancipation. 

As Joan stood bound to the stake, and as the smoke and 
flames were hiding her from the vulgus profanum, a wild-eyed 
monk advanced to the pyre. He held aloft a large iron cross 
having upon it an ivory figure of the tortured Christ. A look of 
infinite sympathy and love lit up the eyes of Joan as they 
rested upon the Christ. Her lips parted in prayer. Blessings 
upon Charles VII., prayerful petitions for her beloved France 
were heard thro' the crackling flames. Not once did her eyes 
turn from the tortured form upon the cross ; thence was coming 
the strength that enabled her to bear the pangs of death, thence, 
too, the grace which urged her to pray for her murderers. 

Round her rolled the fire; her long black hair was blazing, 

89 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

her head, her face, her wondrous eyes were flooded in flame. 
All was ending. But the monk held aloft the Crucifix. A gust 
of wind parted the fire, again the charred eyes rested upon the 
tortured form on the cross, her lips moved in prayer ; and again 
she was lost in flames. Thus perished Joan of Are, aged nine- 
teen, virgin and martyr. 

Take not the ivory Christ aAvay. 'Tis sorrow 's mutual friend ; 
'tis the strength of strong agony ; 'tis the sympathizing consoler 
of the rack, the stake, the prison house of pain, the dim valley 
of the Shadow, the Rouen sea of flames. The Crucifix under- 
stands. 

Pan ? Well, yes, for the bright blue Arcadian hour in young- 
heart Arcady. But for the gray every day and the solemn 
night ; for the hours of pain and loss and parting and change, 
sickness, old age, sorrow; for the crucial crises of life as they 
come in bitter pangs to us of a lost Arcady; for the mother 
whose boy fell at Vera Cruz ; for a Joan of Arc in the flames — 
ah ! take your grinning Pan away ; we want the Crucifix, we 
want the thorny crowned Christ who has suffered and under- 
stands. 

Ten years after the death of Joan, there was a judicial re- 
versal of her sentence of condemnation. Twenty-five years later 
the Church instituted a thorough investigation of Joan 's claims, 
deeds, trial, condemnation, and death. The process and results 
of this inquiry may be found in detail in the work "Proces de 
Condemnation et de Rehabilitation de Jeanne D'Arc, published 
in five volumes, by the Societe de L 'Histoire de France. 

Many eminent English authors, besides innumerable French 
biographers, have written in deep sympathy with Joan of Arc; 
among them may be mentioned Southey, Hallam, Carlyle, 
Landor, de Quincy, Lang, and our own Mark Twain. Voltaire's 
vulgar burlesque-epic is now generally regarded as an insult 

90 



ORLEANS 

to France and a superficial satiric calumny. Schiller in The 
"Maid of Orleans" distorts well known historical facts. 

In 1869 Mgr. Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans presented at 
the Vatican his petition and claims for the beatification of Joan 
of Arc. The trial proceeded slowly, but on April 11, 1909, 
Pius X., the present reigning pontiff, pronounced the decree 
which raised Joan to the first step in the process of canoniza- 
tion. She was solemnly declared Blessed. "A Mass and Office 
of Blessed Joan taken from the Commune Virginum with 
"proper" prayers have been approved of by the Holy See for 
use in the diocese of Orleans." Joan's canonization is now 
under active consideration. 



91 



Chapter X. 

LEPANTO 

Cross or Crescent! We of the present time can form no 
adequate idea of the import couched in those words in mediaeval 
time. Strange that rivers of blood should flow in the interests 
of the cause of the Prince of Peace ! Would the Christ, — who, 
dying upon the Cross prayed for his murderers, — have it so? 
Perhaps over his friends even more pitifully than over his 
erring inimical world the sublime impetration unceasingly as- 
cends Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. 

And Allah "the mild, the merciful, the compassionate" — 
where was he that tragic Sunday morning October 7, 1571, 
when one hundred thousand of his followers, singularly lacking 
in his characteristic qualities, stood red-hand in slaughter ! Alas 
for the ideal when fitted to the real : it is shattered ; its shimmer- 
ing iridescence dies down gray and dead. 

To Fight or Not to Fight. 

The Ottoman empire, flushed by a long series of successes 
under Solyman the Magnificent, had grown insolently aggressive. 
The memory of Tours and of Belgrade no longer acted as a 
deterrent to the fierce victors of Constantinople; their eyes 
were ever turned longingly toward western Europe, and their 
dreams were of bloodshed and victory. 

The island Cyprus belonged to Venice, but its situation made 
it highly desirable as an Ottoman possession; and upon the old 
principle that might makes right — a principle unfortunately 
ever retaliatively new — the Turkish forces besieged Cyprus. The 

92 



LEPANTO 

town Nicosia, capital of Cyprus, fell an easy prey, and the 
atrocities committed on the defenceless inhabitants horror- 
thrilled the Christian world. Later the town Famagosta after a 
prolonged and obstinate resistance was captured but under cir- 
cumstances of peculiar malignity. In the words of Prescott: 
"While lying off Cephalonia Don John received word that 
Famagosta, the second city of Cyprus, had fallen into the hands 
of the enemy, and this under circumstances of unparalleled 
perfidy and cruelty. The place, after a defence that had cost 
hecatombs of lives to the besiegers, was allowed to capitulate 
on honorable terms. Mustapha, the Moslem commander, the 
same fierce chief who had conducted the siege of Malta, requested 
an interview at his quarters with four of the principal Vene- 
tian captains. After a short and angry conference, he ordered 
them all to execution. Three were beheaded. The other, a 
noble named Bragadina, he caused to be flayed alive in the 
market place of the city. The skin of the wretched victim was 
then stuffed: and with this ghastly trophy dangling from the 
yard-arm of his galley, the brutal monster sailed back to Con- 
stantinople, to receive the reward of his services from Selim 
(son and successor of Solyman)." 

Submit to that? "Wait apathetically for the Turks to come 
to Venice, Rome, Madrid and do in like manner? Well, no; 
not in the real, whatever may be the ideal. What then? Why, 
Fight. 

Non-resistance : and if thine enemy smite thee upon the cheek, 
turn to him the other also; and if he take thy coat give to 
him also thy cloak; love your enemies; do good to them that 
hate you and despitefully use you: and as result, what? 
Crucifixion. A nation of Christs would be put to death as un- 
justly as was the Christ of Calvary. 

Fortunately or unfortunately — we know not which it may 
prove to be — only the Tolstoyan few will carry to their logical 

93 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

conclusions the principles of non-resistance; and few, if any, 
even of the Tolstoyan few, will abide by these conclusions and 
stand calm, kind, compassionate, even under the fatal final In- 
justice. The great body of men, of today as of every other day 
of the long ages of time, defend their rights; and if that de- 
fence means that blood must flow, — then let it flow. And all 
the more freely will blood flow and all the more sternly in- 
domitable will be the strife when men feel themselves justified 
as they strike the blow; when they feel themselves called upon 
to conquer or to die for a cause that they hold just; when 
they fight elated and fortified with the assurance that they 
stand as bulwarks warding off the concrete embodiment of all 
that they hold evil from all that they hold dear and good. 

"The bravest are the tenderest, 
The loving are the daring." 

Some of the bravest and the tenderest of men have trodden 
knee deep in human blood. There have been wars just and 
inevitable; and what has been may again be. We hope not; 
we dream not; the Peace Palace of the Hague looms spectrally 
on the future horizon; we are looking that way: and at times 
this Peace Palace seems assertively real — ready to cope with 
armaments and with red-hot wrongs; but again it rises fanci- 
fully and floats evanescently away and fades on a gray sky. 
Is it Mirage? 

The Christian Knight. 

Next in moral excellence to the Christian martyr is undoubt- 
edly the Christian knight. 

Chivalry — fair flower of Feudalism, night blooming cereus 
wide opening in white splendor exuding fragrance in somber 
mediaeval midnight! King Arthur and his Table Round; 
knights errant done to death by Don Quixote and yet victors 
even over the smile ; Chevalier Bayard, the knight without fear 

94 



LEPANTO 

and without reproach ; Richard Coeur de Lion, the Black Prince, 
Lohengren, Parsifal, Siegfried, Don John of Austria — are flow- 
erets of that Flower caught wax-white in amber and fixed 
fadelessly. 

In all the sweep of history from Egypt to the hour, there 
is nothing nobler than the ideal Christian knight. To stand in 
awe of the omnipotent God ; to go about the world redressing hu- 
man wrongs; to love with young-world love bashfully reverent, 
constrained to win the world and lay it humbly at her feet; to 
reverence truth and to scorn with scorn unutterable all the 
thousand and one manifestations of the lie; to be loyal to king 
and country and God; to be gentle, courteous, kind to all life 
from highest to lowest; to stand face-front to the oncoming 
forces of evil and in that fight grimly to conquer or die : there 
is nothing nobler. 

And yet not for all the glory of Don John, ideal Chirstian 
knight and hero of Lepanto, would I have one little stain of 
human blood on my white hands. 

"New occasions teach new duties; 
Time makes ancient good uncouth." — Lowell. 

Nevertheless he who would sympathetically and justly depict 
the past should be capable of entering into and all round esti- 
mating that ancient good now grown uncouth. And whatever 
the best men of any given age or time or clime unanimously 
hold as best must, in the deep heart of things, be best for that 
age or time or clime. The knight, the hero, the Crusader, the 
victor over the Saracens seemed best to the best men of the 
Middle Age. 

Pope Pius V. earnestly advocated the cause of Venice. He 
appealed to the Christian monarchs of Europe to join with the 
Holy See in a League having for its object the total overthrow 
of the Ottoman empire He urged the aggressive policy of the 

95 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

Turks under Solyman the Magnificent and his unworthy son 
and successor Selim II.; he vividly portrayed the atrocities of 
Turkish conquest and the blight upon civilization that ever un- 
erringly followed in the wake of the Crescent; and he en- 
deavored by all means in his power to arouse in the hearts of 
the children of the Church the spirit that had made possible 
the First Crusade. 

All Europe at this time mourned its Christian captives who 
were languishing in Turkish dungeons or wasting away as galley 
slaves. Twelve thousand of these Christian captives were 
chained to the oars as galley slaves on the Moslem ships while 
the fight Lepanto was raging; their liberation and restoration 
to freedom formed the purest joy-pearl in the gem casket of 
that joyous victory. 

Cyprus had just faJlen into the hands of the Turks amid 
scenes of unparalleled barbarity: and against the Turk as the 
destroyer of civilization and the menace of Christendom all 
eyes were directed, all hearts beat with desire to avenge, slay, 
destroy: and all these feelings found outlet, and culmination 
and gratification in the battle of Lepanto, under Don John of 
Austria, the Christian knight. 

Ocean Encounters. 

Ocean instability, ocean vastness, ocean majestic indifference 
to the pigmy life and death struggles of men throw a magnetic 
glow over sea fights. 

When the bay of Salamis changed gradually from greenish 
gray to red; when the Ionian sea slowly purpled off Actium, 
crimsoning the frightened barge of Cleopatra and of love mad- 
dened Anthony; when the waters at the entrance of the gulf 
Lepanto grew blood-red fed by trickling streams from five hun- 
dred galleys: did ocean care? The Titanic sinks and the bil- 

96 



LEPANTO 

lows dash high in foam play, they descend sportively with her in- 
to her grave hole, they arise and roll on : the Volturno blazes on 
a background of black sky, a foreground of flame-lit angry 
rolling waves: and does ocean care? 

Don John arranged his battle line in a semi-circular stretch 
of about one mile embracing the entrance to the gulf of Lepanto 
(now Gulf Corinth). The Turkish fleet lay concealed some- 
where on the water of the gulf and must come out at the en- 
trance and fight openly or remain bottled up in the gulf until 
forced out by starvation. Don John knew his adversary, Ali 
Pasha, too well to dream that the latter alternative would be 
accepted by the sturdy Moslem. 

Early Sunday morning (Oct. 7, 1571) Don John sighted a 
line of ships far in the gulf but making steadily for the opening. 
Battle was at hand. Don John, in his flagship, the Real, pass- 
ed from vessel to vessel encouraging and animating his soldiers. 
"You have come," he said, "to fight the battle of the Cross; 
to conquer or to die. But whether you are to die or conquer, 
do your duty this day and you will secure a glorious immor- 
tality." He then returned to his position in the center of the 
semi-circle, and in that conspicuous position seen by all, he 
knelt in prayer under the far floating banner of the League. 
His example was followed by all, and the priests of whom there 
was at least one if not more on each galley, went around giving 
the last absolution to the men as they knelt in prayer. 

The Ottoman shouts now filled the air as the long line of 
three hundred galleys arranged as a crescent, paused for a mo- 
ment at the opening of the gulf. The center of the Christian 
fleet following Don John advanced to the Ottoman center com- 
manded by Ali Pasha ; the left wing under Barbarigo, the Vene- 
tian admiral, sought as adversary the opposing wing under 
Mahomet Sirocco; the right wing under Andrew Doria grap- 
pled with the opposing Mohammedan left under Ulrich Ali, dey 

97 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

of Algiers. For four hours the battle raged. So dense was the 
canopy of smoke enveloping the combatants that neither side 
knew for a certainty which was winning until the drawing 
down of the Ottoman banner and the hasty hauling up of the 
Banner of the League on board the flagship of Ali Pasha made 
known the result decisively. Shouts then rent the air and 
groans. 

The Moslem left wing under the brave sea captain Ulrich 
Ali was engaged in a fierce grappling fight with Doria, and the 
advantage seemed to be with the Moslems. Don John seeing 
this, hastened to Doria 's aid. Ulich Ali, seeing that all was 
lost ordered his men at the oars to make all possible speed for 
escape round the promontory. The Christian vessels gave chase, 
but the Moslem galleys sped with the speed of the wind and 
were soon lost to sight. About forty vessels were thus saved 
out of the three hundred that had taken part in the engage- 
ment. Of these one hundred and thirty were siezed as prizes 
by the Christian forces, the rest having been sunk or burned 
in the fight. 

The Ottoman loss is estimated between twenty-five thousand 
and thirty thousand; that of the Christians at eight thousand. 
The superior marksmanship of the allies and their use ex- 
clusively of firearms, while the Turks used in part bows and 
arrows ; the better make and equipment of the Christian galleys 
— are among the causes to which human reason may attribute the 
incredible disparity between the Turkish loss and that of the 
Christians in this engagement. But there are many circum- 
stances peculiar to this battle for which human reason can assign 
no cause. 

It is related on good authority that as the Christian soldiers 
arose from prayer the wind which had hitherto been blowing 
steadily from the gulf, suddenly veered around and blew right 
into the faces of the enemy. In the course of the engage- 

98 



LEPANTO 

ment the sun, too, reached the point where its rays shot into 
the eyes of the Turkish marksmen and caused them to err in 
their aim. Pope Pius V. who, while the battle was in progress, 
was closeted in consultation with a number of cardinals, in the 
Vatican, suddenly arose from his seat and approaching the 
window and casting up his eyes to the heavens exclaimed as 
tears of joy rolled down his cheeks, "A truce to business; our 
great task at present is to thank God for the victory He has 
just given the Christians." 

Death op Ai.i Pasha. 

The struggle between The Real, Don John's flagship, and 
the galley bearing Ali Pasha was of course pivotal. Each 
commander felt that upon him and his ship depended the is- 
sue of the combat. Both were brave men, both must conquer 
or die : Don John conquered, Ali Pasha died. 

The ships had grappled and a hand to hand conflict was 
raging upon the decks. Blood slowly trickled down the sides 
of the galleys and the waters were incarnadined. 

In the heat of the engagement a musket ball struck the 
head of the Moslem, commander. He fell prone and lay for 
some time unconscious upon a heap of the dying and the dead. 
But suddenly regaining consciousness he attempted to rise and 
was at once recognized by the surrounding Spanish soldiers. 
They were about to despatch him with their swords when the 
wily Moslem appealing to their natural cupidity made known 
to them the secret hiding place of his ship's treasure. The 
lure of gold led the soldiers to hasten below leaving their vic- 
tim to chance life or death on the deck. But just as dear life 
seemed secured from the ruthless thrust of death, the wounded 
commander was confronted by a strangely savage figure with 
uplifted sword. It was one of the Christian galley slaves long 

99 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

chained on All's vessel and but that hour given freedom from 
the hated oar. In vain did Ali Pasha appeal to this soldier's 
cupidity ; nothing seemed quite so desirable to him as the death 
of the man who had so long chained him a galley slave. The 
threatening sword fell unerringly upon the wounded Moslem 
chief and buried itself in his heart. With this retributive blow 
the tide of victory turned decisively in favor of the Christians. 

Don John of Austria, 

There are few characters upon the historic page more full 
in promise and yet futile in attainment than Don John of 
Austria. The idol of all Europe, the knight sans peur et sans 
reprochc, the hero of Lepanto — at the age of twenty-four; he 
died seven years later in comparative obscurity; a rude hut 
hastily erected to receive the dying commander served as his 
last resting place upon earth. 

As Don John lay in the agony of death, a terrific storm sud- 
denly broke over the camp ; and as in the case of Napoleon 
under somewhat similar cricumstances, Don Jolin partly arose, 
muttered incoherently of battle and victory, then sank back 
and died. Did the rattle of the storm suggest the din of battle ? 
Or did vague visions of another storm arise associatively in 
memory? History relates that tho' that battle Sunday, Oct. 7, 
1571, was a day of ideal autumn brightness, yet when the strife 
was fairly over and the battered galleys with their dead and 
wounded and sorely wearied men were hea^'ily entering port, a 
storm suddenly arose : the skies darkened ominously, lightning 
flashed from the lowering clouds, thunder reverberated, and 
torrential rains poured down. For twenty-four hours the storm 
continued. "Was nature indignantly weeping over the errorr> 
and sufferings of her children? Was she striving to wash out 
from old ocean — the rugged, primal, favorite work of her hands 
— those awful stains of blood? 

100 



LEPANTO 

As Don John had hastened to port under the gathering 
storm he gave orders that the Moslem galleys rendered worth- 
less by the battle should be stripped of everything of value and 
then set on fire. And so it was that when safe in port the 
Christian conquerors looking out thro' the storm saw the burn- 
ing ships. They luridly lit up the darkness and blazed wildly 
down to the waves — mutely eloquent witnesses of the horror and 
desolation of war. 

Did the dulling senses of the hero of Lepanto see that scene, 
hear that storm — as the winds raged round his temporary 
shelter and death in blasting splendor closed over all? Or did 
the fair ' ' castles in Spam ' ' rise again spectrally with light upon 
them from beyond the grave as the dreamer of royal dreams 
sank down to the real ? That wonderful African empire so near, 
so far : that beauteous bride, Mary Queen of Scots, liberated, re- 
leased, restored by his own good sword; wooed and won and 
with her the throne of that imperious usurper Elizabeth Tudor : 
that smile of pontiffs, that commendation of Catholic Europe, 
that proud praise from the lips of his father's son, Philip II. 
of Spain — as he, the hero of Lepanto, the champion of Christen- 
dom, returned fresh-laureled from new combats and victories, a 
king, a crowned lover, an Emperor — Dreams! 

"Take, fortune, whatever you choose 
You gave and may take again; 
I've nothing 'twould pain me to lose. 
For I own no more castles in Spain." 

Don John is buried in the Escorial. His name and fame 
are inseparably associated with the decisive victory of the Cross 
over the Crescent off the entrance to the gulf Lepanto. 

An admirable painting of this battle The Victory of the 
League by Titian still adorns the walls of the Museo, Madrid. 

The petition Mary, Help of Christians inserted on this oc- 
casion in the litany of Loretto bears evidence even today of the 

101 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

gratitude felt by Pius V. and with him all Christendom for de- 
liverance from the unspeakable Turk. 

The historian Ranke speaking of the effects of this battle 
says: "The Turks lost all their old confidence after the battle 
of Lepanto. They had no equal to oppose to Don John of 
Austria. The day of Lepanto broke down the Ottoman su- 
premacy. ' ' 



102 



Chapter XI. 

THE INVINCIBLE ARMADA 

Spain's proudly invincible Armada left Lisbon, May 20, 
1588 with one hundred and forty ships and thirty thousand 
four hundred and ninety-seven men; fifty-three shattered ves- 
sels, and ten thousand men, vincible and humbled, returned to 
port Santander, Sept. 13, 1588. This disaster led to the decad- 
ence of Spain as a maritine power, and indirectly to the decline 
of Spanish dominance both in the old and in the new world. 

The effects of any great event are not immediately discern- 
ible nor are its causes ever fully revealed. When Philip II. of 
Spain received with courteous equanimity his defeated admiral, 
the Duke of Medina Sidonia, and to his words, 

"And you see here, great King, 
All that remains of the Armada's might 
And of the flower of Spain." 

made answer, 

"God rules above us ! 
I sent you to contend with men and not 
With rocks and storms. You're welcome to Madrid." — Schiller. 

did the great King see then either the causes or the conse- 
quences of the vincibility of his Invincible Armada! 

The character of Philip II. is portrayed upon the historic 
page in colors of sharp contrast. To the Spaniards he was 
their Solomon, their "prudent king"; to Motley and the 
Netherlands he was "the demon of the South." 

Philip II. was the finished product of his age and nation. 
Pride, intolerance, absolutism combined with excellent admini- 

103 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

strative ability, deep tho ' narrow religious convictions, and rigor- 
ous sincerity, characterized both the man and the monarch. 
To a victim of an Auto da Fe he said with stern truthfulness, 
"If my own son were guilty like you I should lead him with 
my own hands to the stake." 

As to Philip's really having delivered his son, Don Carlos, 
into the hands of the Grand Inquisitor as tragically told in 
Schiller's "Don Carlos", well that is drama, not history. But 
when a noted name and its suggested personality — for good or 
for evil and unfortunately less frequently for good than for 
evil — are once fascinatingly fixed in drama or story or song, 
not all the tomes of contradictory evidence, not all the living 
archives of dead centuries, not Truth itself, can shatter the 
crystal charm or make it cease shining. Alexander the Great, 
world conqueror; Socrates, the Wise; Plato, poet-philosopher; 
Artistotle, master of them that know ; Julius Caesar, deplored of 
all nations; Mark Anthony, Cleopatra's lover; Nero, monster; 
Caligula- Commodus-Heliogabalus, crowned madmen; Marcus 
Aurelius, Emperor-philosopher; Charlemagne, the Good; Louis 
IX., the Saint; Louis XI., hypocrite; John of England, child 
murderer; Richard III., deformed devil; Henry VIIL, wife- 
killer; Macchiavelli, serpent-sophist; Louis XIV., despot, Arbiter 
Elegantiarum; Elizabeth, Good Queen Bess; Mary, Queen of 
Scots, the lovely unfortunate; Philip II. of Spain, bigot: thus 
are they fixed in the charmed circle of literature and thus shall 
they glitter forever. 

Is history itself any more realiable than drama? As to facts, 
Yes ; as to motives, intentions, cumulative causes, results, all 
round truth. No. "Histories are as perfect as the historian is 
wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul," says the astute 
Carlyle ; and every honest author feels at deepest heart the 
truth of these words. The soft art of omission is known to 
every artist of the pen. And condemnation euphemistically 

104 



THE INVINCIBLE ARMADA 

balanced by excusing comment may, in one artistic sentence, 
satisfy at once a writer's conscience, his subjectivity, and the 
claims of his peculiar environment. Can any one doubt that it 
was thus Macaulay wrote his brilliant history of England ? And 
even granted almost the impossible — that an historian be rug- 
gedly truthful and fearlessly sincere ; he is not thereby rendered 
wise, nor is he necessarily gifted with an eye and a soul. 

So in colors of sharp contrast upon the historic page will 
Philip II. ever be portrayed; but both can't be right. Perhaps 
tho ' they may be as sundered extremes of a prismatic ray which, 
when complementary coloring shall have been added, will be- 
come white light. 

Storms. 

Truly it was against storms and rocks as well as against 
such rough sea-dogs as Drake and Hawkins and Raleigh and 
Frobisher and Howard that the Invincible Armada contended. 
In the beginning of the northward cruise as the Armada was 
rounding the corner of Spain, off Corunna, a violent tempest 
arose. The frail caravels, and galeons and galeasses of 1588 
were not so independent of wave and wind as are the Dread- 
noughts of 1914. Yet ocean is still master of man; and man's 
most titan-like Titanic is but a puny plaything in old Nep- 
tune's hand. 

Several vessels were lost in the storm, and the fleet was 
so badly damaged that in consequence the Spanish Admiral was 
obliged to stop off at Corunna for repairs. July 12th, after 
so inauspicious a beginning, the fleet was again on its way north- 
ward. 

Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, captain general of all 
the Spanish armies, was at Dunkirk with a flotilla of large flat- 
bottomed barges awaiting the Armada to convoy him and his 

105 



BATTLES or DESTINY 

army across the channel. His plan was to invade England by- 
way of the Thames and land his veteran forces in Ijondon. 

"Alexander Farnese, prince of Parma, captain general of 
the Spanish armies, and governor of the Spanish possessions 
in the Netherlands, was beyond all comparison the greatest 
military genius of his age. He was also highly distinguished 
for political wisdom and sagacity, and for his great administra- 
tive talents. He was idolized by his troops, whose affection he 
knew how to win without relaxing their discipline or diminish- 
ing his own authority. Pre-eminently cool and circumspect in 
his plans, but swift and energetic when the moment arrived for 
striking a decisive blow, neglecting no risk that caution could 
provide against, conciliating even the populations of the districts 
which he attacked by his scrupulous good faith ; his moderation, 
and his address; Farnese was one of the most formidable gen- 
erals that ever could be placed at the head of an army designed 
not only to win battles, but to effect conquests. Happy it is 
for England and the world that this island was saved from be- 
coming an arena for the exhibition of his powers." Creasy. 

As in 1588 Alexander Farnese with a chosen army awaited at 
Dunkirk the assistance of the Armada both to clear the seas 
of Dutch and English war ships and to convoy in safety his 
flotilla to the coast of England : so, too, in 1805 Napoleon Bona- 
parte awaited at Boulogne for Villeneuve to do him a like serv- 
ice ; and in both cases the English fleet took the offensive and 
destroyed at one blow both the protective war boats of the enemy 
and the hopeful plans of the man who waited. The sea fights 
at Calais Roads and at Trafalgar are perhaps negatively mo- 
mentous in history but not the less momentous. 

The Spanish fleet after some disastrous fighting with the 
English cruisers off the coast of Plymouth succeeded in reach- 
ing Calais Roads (July 27). Here they were quickly semi- 
circled by the combined Dutch and English fleet under Lord 

106 



THE INVINCIBLE ARMADA 

Charles Howard, high admiral of England. The Spanish ships 
were far greater in bulk than those of the opposing force and in 
the harbor of Calais they were huddled together "like strong 
castles fearing no assault, the lesser placed in the middle ward." 
The lighter English ships, no longer able to use their two best 
assets, nimbleness and advantage of the wind, clung doggedly 
around these ocean leviathans awaiting the hour of opportunity. 
At length early on the morning of the 29th the English Ad- 
miral succeeded in thrusting eight Greek fire-ships in among 
the compact wooden war vessels. The effect was electrical. The 
Spanish ships cut their cables and were dispersed and the fight 
ship to ship was soon in full progress. All day long from early 
dawn till dark this battle raged. The Spaniards were driven 
out from Calais Roads and past the Flemish ports and far out 
bej'ond Dunkirk where the Prince of Parma waited. The Eng- 
lish then ceased pursuit. Lord Henry Seymour with an able 
squadron was left to maintain the blockade of the Flemish port 
and to render ineffectual the activities of the Prince of Parma. 

Northward sped the vincible Armada farther and farther 
from sunny Spain. She had many wounded men on board 
ships, her provisions were failing, the channel filled with vic- 
torious Dutch and English war boats offered no hope of a way of 
return, and at last in desperation the Spanish admiral directed 
the course of his ships around the northern coast of Scotland 
and Ireland. What a long and cruel way home for wounded 
soldiers, starving sailors, and disheartened generals! But even 
here ill luck pursued them. A storm arose as they were pass- 
ing thro' the Orkneys; their vessels were dispersed, many were 
lost. About thirty ships were afterwards wrecked on the west 
coast of Ireland, and those of the crews who succeeded in reach- 
ing the shore were immediately put to death. It is estimated 
that fourteen thousand thus perished. 

And in September of that memorable year there came strag- 

107 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

gling ship by ship into the port Santander all that were 
left of the gallant fleet that had sailed away five months ago 
to subdue England and so win all Europe for Spain. 

Nor was that plan at all chimerical, nor its realization im- 
probable. Spain was at that time in possession of Portugal, 
Naples, Sicily, Milan, Franche-Compte, and the Netherlands; in 
Africa she controlled Tunis, Oran, the Cape Verde and the 
Canary islands; in Asia, the Philippine and Sunda Islands and 
part of the Moluccas; in the New World, the empire of Peru, 
and of Mexico, New Spain, Chili, Hispaniola and Cuba. Only 
England held out against the power of Spain and stood adaman- 
tine to all her threats, cajolery, caresses. Only England stood 
between Philip II. of Spain and Spanish dominance in the old 
and in the New World. English buccanneers siezed upon his 
galeons on their return gem-laden from Peru and Mexico. 
Drake the "master robber of the New World" had signally dis- 
honored Philip of Spain and had in requital been honored by 
the English queen with the title Sir Francis. England must be 
destroyed (Britannia delenda est.) Spain seemed powerful 
enough by land and by sea to be as a new Rome to old Carthage : 
but winds and waves and rocky coasts and adamantine Eng- 
lishmen reversed the Roman story (Britannia non deleta est.) 

The Sixteenth Century. 

"What we appear is subject to the judgment 
Of all mankind; and what we are, of no man." 

Schiller in "Mary Stuart." 

These lines upon the lips of Elizabeth Tudor are her con- 
demnation in the judgment of all mankind. Short sighted, in- 
deed, and headed directly towards the rapids of the all revealing 
Real is the mortal who thus honors appearances. 

Elizabeth would have Mary Stuart put to death, but would 
seem to have tried to save her: Elizabeth would sign the death 

108 



THE INVINCIBLE ARMADA 

warrant, but would seem to have been constrained, to have done 
so regretfuU}'^, to have recalled the fatal sentence when, alas! 
too late. But all this flimsy Seeming has been blown away by 
the rugged years; and that which this Macchievellian queen 
thought subject to the judgment of no man has become her con- 
demnation in the eyes of all. 

So close they lie together now in old Westminster Abbey 
— these rival queens who once so cordially feared and hated one 
another ! and for whose conflicting ambitions all Britain was not 
room enough, but one must die ! How ignoble seems now the 
strife, how despicable the deed of culminant hate, how diaphan- 
ous all the Seeming ! Was it worth while ? 

The death of Mary, Queen of Scots, at the hands of her 
cousin Queen Elizabeth aroused a feeling of angry indignation 
in every court of Europe. France, Spain, and the Vatican, 
openly denounced the deed. And it was, in great measure, in 
execration of this unnatural cruelty that Pope Sextus V. espous- 
ed the cause of Philip II. of Spain and urged and aided the in- 
vasion of England. 

Strange that such men as Edmund Spenser, author of 
Faerie Queen and Sir Walter Raleigh, mirror of chivalry, should 
have been among the foremost to demand the death of the Scot- 
tish queen. But those were turbulent times. Life and death 
never played the mortal game more boldly and recklessly and 
desperately than in the sixteenth century. The magic of the 
New World was upon the old; the glamour of gem-lit El 
Dorados shimmered across the seas; and thither responsively 
rushed in shaky ships and leaky caravals those whom the gods 
would destroy made mad by the bite of the gold-tarantula. "We 
are as near to heaven by sea as by land", shouted Sir Humphrey 
Gilbert as his frail bark was lost in the storm ; as his deck lights 
rose high and dashed low and darkened far down 'neath the sea- 
lashing storm. 

109 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

And night with wondering stars looked down upon De Soto's 
lordly grave. And then as now and even throughout the his- 
toric ages, the prehistoric, the geologic — the thundering waters 
fell and formed Niagara Falls. In silvery moonlight, in dazzling 
sun-radiance rainbow-frilled, in blinding white of winter, in 
rainy spring, in saber flashing summer storm — the thunder- 
waters fell ; they fall ; they shall fall. 

When Columbus and his crew, secretly fearful of falling 
off the good old planet Earth, sailed the unknown sea; while 
Cortes conquered Mexico (not yet calm) ; while Pizarro ravaged 
Peru; while Balboa ascended the Andean heights and "silent 
upon a peak in Darien ' ' first saw the vast Pacific ; while De Soto 
died and was buried; while Drake circumnavigated the globe; 
while Mary, Queen of Scots laid her head on the block and the 
axe fell ; while the Invincible Armada hurrying northward away 
from the foe, sailed brokenly back to Spain by way of the 
Orkneys: while Julius Cgesar fell pierced with twenty-three 
wounds; while Hannibal crossed the Alps; while Alexander, 
world-conqueror, aged thirty-two died at old Babylon; while 
Pericles of Athens reigned imperishably ; while Sardis burned 
and Sardis was avenged ; while Marathon, Salamis, Thermopylae, 
Platsea, Mycale were fighting; while Babylon the Great was cap- 
tured by Cyrus; while the Memphian pyramids were building; 
while the great Sphinx of Gizeh rose solemnly : while griffins and 
dragons and gummy pterodactyls winged the air ; while 
plesiosauri and ichthyosauri fought for the empire of ocean; 
while the original of the Pittsburgh Diplodocus Carnegiei was 
sixty feet somewhere — why, even then were the waters rolling 
over the rock now called Niagara; even then Niagara Falls that 
fall and shall fall were falling. 

Sea Fights. 

The hostile encounters by land throughout the historic ages 
have been practically countless; sea fights are few. Man feels 

110 



THE INVINCIBLE ARMADA 

intuitively that the yielding wave is not the fit place for battle. 
Salamis, Actium, Lepanto, Calais Roads are the chief naval en- 
gagements of history. 

When Rome had won her first game in world conquest and 
all Italy was Rome, Carthage was mistress of the Mediterran- 
ean, and without her permission no man might even wash his 
hands in her "Phoenician Lake." Triremes and quinqueremes 
with proudly curving prows scudded over the blue waters or 
huddled together in port as bevies of black swans. 

And Rome had no fleet. But Rome could learn from her 
enemies; and when a wrecked Carthaginian galley was dashed 
against the Latian coast, Rome quickly learned the art of mak- 
ing galleys ; and within two months the waving forest near the 
coast was metamorphosed into a fleet of one hundred and twen- 
ty Roman triremes. 

And when the pain of growth was lipon Rome 'making 
further conquest fatally necessary, she embarked unsteadily up- 
on her late waving forest trees and went reeling forth to meet 
the swan bevies of the Mediterranean. The hostile fleets en- 
gaged and Rome's was annihilated. 

Then these sullen young-world children wildly wept, as did 
Romulus and Remus, perhaps, in the cave of the she-wolf. But 
y.'hen they were suckled and made strong with the milk of de- 
feat, these wild young Romans built themselves another fleet. 
And Duillius devised a grappling contrivance whereby to catch 
and hold the enemy's ship until a drawbridge could be thrown 
across o'er which the short-sword Roman soldiers might pass 
and so fight on the deck hand to hand as on land. 

Again the hostile fleets engaged on the blue Mediterran- 
ean. But as the haughty quinqueremes with their decks filled 
with archers bore down upon the awkward Roman triremes, the 
grappling "hands" arose, the quinqueremes were grappled. 

Ill 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

Consternation prevailed among the Carthaginians as the draw- 
bridges from ship to ship were thrown across, and the dreaded 
Roman soldiers short-sword in hand were seen slaughtering the 
archers and the rowers. Rome's first naval victory was won. 

If the blue Mediterranean could make known all that has 
taken place upon its waves and shores — what a Homer of the 
waters it would be! But nature is indifferent to the human 
tragedy. 

That other scene off the coast of Carthage, after the second 
Punic war, when Rome demanded as a condition of peace that 
the Carthaginian fleet should be destroyed — yet burns upon 
the historic page, but the waters that once reddened with the 
flames just ripple unrememberingly. Five hundred galleys — 
towering quinqueremes, sturdy triremes — were led out from the 
harbor before the mourning gaze of the dethroned Queen of the 
Seas, and set on fire ; she watched them blaze down to the 
laughing waters. 

Actium was fought on the Adriatic off the promontory on the 
west coast of Greece. Here half the world was bartered for one 
fleeing galley and one woman. "While the conflict was yet 
doubtful and victory seemed even favorably inclined to perch 
upon the prow of Anthony's vessel, the barge of Cleopatra shud- 
deringly backed out from the bloody fray, wavered, turned, and 
sped southward. Mare Anthony followed. Upon the defeat 
of the allied Roman and Egyptian forces at Actium and over 
the tragically dead forms of Anthony and Cleopatra, Octavius 
Cffisar arose to world dominance, becoming Augustus Cffisar, 
Emperor, Pater Patrias, and one man Ruler of Rome, Mistress 
of the world. 

Lepanto was fought at the entrance of the Gulf of Corinth, 
not far from Actium. Here the Cross triumphed over the 
Crescent and rescued Europe from the deadly blight of Islam- 

112 



THE INVINCIBLE ARMADA 

ism. Don John of Austria, aged twenty-four, led the Christian 
forces; Alexander Farnese (Prince of Parma), then a youth of 
twenty, won here his first of many laurels under the gener- 
ously approving eyes of his young cousin-commander, Don 
John. 

And seventeen years later (1571-1588) the Prince of Parma, 
Captain general of all the Spanish armies, awaited impatiently 
at Dunkirk for Admiral Medina Sidonia to clear the channel 
of hostile vessels so that he and his veteran army might sail 
across and attack old England. He watched the fight off 
Gravelines. How his hot Spanish heart must have indignantly 
throbbed even to bursting, as helplessly cooped in port with a 
flotilla of unarmed barges to protect, and Lord Seymour with a 
strong blockading squadron at the mouth of the harbor, he could 
only see and know and acutely feel that a fearful battle was rag- 
ing all day long from dawn till dark and that Spain was losing 
— Spain had lost. One by one hurrying northward past the 
Flemish ports limped the disabled Spanish ships; English and 
Dutch cruisers followed in fierce pursuit. 

The invasion of England by way of the Thames, the con- 
quest of an inveterate foe. Success proudly placing a flaming 
carbuncle upon the coronet of the Prince of Parma, the approv- 
ing glance of Philip and of the fair girl-queen Isabella, Spanish 
dominance in the old and in the new world — all as burst bubbles 
died down in gray mist as twilight descended, as dark night 
gathered over the wave and the world and the fleeing scattered 
shattered ships of Spain's vincible Armada. 



113 



Chapter XII. 

NASEBY 

The battle of Naseby was, perhaps, the anticipative pre- 
ventive of an English ' ' French Revolution. ' ' The diflPerence be- 
tween Cromwell's Ironsides and the gay Frondeurs measures the 
difference between the English people and the French. 

Charles I. aimed to be in England what Louis XIV. was in 
France. Both fully believed in the divine right of Kings ; both 
quoted as their favorite text of Scripture, "Where the word of 
a King is there is power; and who may say unto him 'What 
doest thou?' " But Louis dealt with the fickle Frondeurs and 
Charles with Cromwell 's Ironsides ; and this racial difference had 
as divergent results — absolutism for Louis le Grand and the 
block for Charles Stuart. 

There will always be difference of opinion as to Cromwell's 
place in history. Was he liberator or tyrant, Christian ruler or 
barbarously fanatic despot? There can be but one opinion 
as to the injustice of the trial, condemnation, and death of 
Charles. The Rump Parliament was certainly not representative 
of England. It was Cromwell's creature as arbitrarily as ever 
the Star Chamber was Charles'. 

"Must crimes be punished but by other crimes, and greater 
criminals ? ' ' — Byron. 

But as a force in favor of constitutional government and 
civic liberty, however abused in immediate practice ; and as a 
threatening protest against the abuse of power in high places; 
and as a veiled challenge of defiance to every absolute monarch 
— the battle fought June 14, 1645, at Naseby, Northamptonshire, 

114 



NASEBY 

between the Royalists under Charles I. and the Parliamentarians 
under Fairfax must ever be considered a victory decisive and 
for all time advantageous. 

Queen Henrietta Maria. 

Henrietta Maria was the daughter of Henry IV. of France, 
the first Bourbon, and his second wife, Maria de Medici. At 
the age of fifteen she was married to Charles I. of England ; and 
her best and happiest years as wife, mother, and Queen were 
spent in England. 

In this princess many of the leading Italian, French and 
English characteristics were met and happily blended. Her 
dark, lithe beauty (as shown in her portrait by Van Dyke), her 
musical ability, instrumental and vocal, her fiery hearted fidelity 
to the religion of her mother, were, perhaps, her heritage from 
sunny Italy; the France of Richelieu might, as an environment, 
conduce favorably to that diplomatic waywardness which, in 
early years, invariably won for the sweet girl-wife whatsoever 
her heart might desire ; but perhaps from England, land of 
realism, chilly fogs, and Cromwellian barbarity, she imbibed her 
sturdy spirit of fortitude and heroic endurance of sorrow. 

"To bear is to conquer our fate", and to refuse to bear and 
to apparently end all by self-destruction, is to fail to conquer 
our fate. 

The hopes and promises of religion are of inestimable value 
as an aid in the endurance of sorrows. When the dread cul- 
mination of all earthly fears and horrors — the beheading of 
Charles I. — clashed full upon the widowed heart of Queen Hen- 
rietta Maria, she withdrew at once from the court of Paris and 
sought solace in seclusion and prayer. The convent, not the 
court ; the divine, not the human ; the hopes and promises of re- 
ligion as red-glowed in the sanctuary of a Carmelite convent 

115 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

chapel, held the balm that soothed her wounded soul in that 
awful culminant woe. 

Which is better — to bear or to fail to bear? to hope and en- 
dure or despair and die ? to pray and bless God saying, The Lord 
gave and the Lord has taken away, blessed he the name of the 
Lord, or to wither away in cursing and impotent hate? to be- 
lieve and grow strongly peaceful in the belief that God is good 
and all is for the best; that all is little and short that passes 
away with time; that God's explanation shall exultingly ex- 
plain forever and ever — or to doubt, negative, deny, and bitterly 
live and despairingly die? Even as a matter of merely human 
wisdom, it is well to believe in the hopes and promises of religion. 

The monastic sanctuaries that arise wherever the Catholic 
Church flourishes, and that lure into their prayerful solitudes 
the ' ' hearts that are heavy with losses and weary with dragging 
the crosses too heavy for mortals to bear" are surely indicative 
of a far higher and happier state of society than that whose 
godless defiance finds suicidal expression in the insidious drug, 
the deadly acid, the desperate bullet. 

The houses of Euthanasia of the near Socialistic future are 
surely as stones unto bread in comparison with the monastic 
sanctuaries of the Middle Ages. 

Wonders op Portraits. 

How wonderful is the art which can impress upon canvas 
and so preserve from generation to generation and from century 
to century, a lifelike presentment of men and women whose flesh 
and blood realities have long since mouldered dust with dust ! 
The canvas endures ; the man dies ? — Ah, no ! he has but shuffled 
off the earth-garment and left it earth with earth; he lives. 

The Van Dyke portraits of Queen Henrietta Maria, Charles I. 
and the children of Charles I. are mutely eloquent. The well- 

116 



NASEBY 

known picture, "Baby Stuart", a detail from the group, "Chil- 
dren of Charles I." suggests the high tide of love and hap- 
piness in the life of Queen Henrietta Maria. She was then 
surrounded by everything that heart could desire, — wealth, 
honor, power, a husband's unbounded love and confidence and 
three beautiful and most promising children. They were Mary, 
who later married William, Prince of Orange; Charles, who, at 
the Restoration, became the "Merry Monarch" of England, and 
James, the baby Stuart, who later became the unfortunate 
James II., the monarch who lost his crown, and whose daughter 
Mary, wedded to her cousin, William, Prince of Orange, son of 
that sister Mary, who, in the portrait, stands at his side, abbetted 
the deposition of her father and wore his crown. 

There is something eloquently pathetic in the portraits of 
men and women who have fallen victims to a tragic fate. The 
principle of contrast is, doubtless, here at work, setting side by 
side with the hour of portrayal that other hour of bitter death. 
Marie Antoinette and her children, as fixed upon canvas by 
the court painter, Madame Vigee LeBrun, derive their rich tonal 
qualities — warm grays and reds, their charm of evanescence, 
their magically somber fascination, from the shadows of the 
Conciergerie and the guillotine. 

The portrait of Charles I. as painted by Van Dyke, must ever 
suggest to the thoughtful student of history that scene, disgrace- 
ful alike to the English nation and to human nature which took 
place on the scaffold just outside Whitehall Palace. 

Yes ; there are two sides to every question, and one is a ruler 
exercising arbitrary power and impregnated with belief in the 
divine right of kings and claiming it his prerogative to break 
up his parliament and govern alone; the other is an assembly 
of men, nominally a parliament, so narrowly fanatic and steep- 
ed in human hate that they demanded as condition under which 
they would agree to levy taxes for Charles I. to use in aid of 

117 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

Protestant Holland, that he should first order every Catholic 
priest in his own realm to be put to death and the property of 
all Catholics to be confiscated. Charles refused. This side of 
the cause of the rupture between Charles I. and his Parlia- 
ment has not the historic prominence of the other side. Why? 
Not very hard to tell why if one considers attentively the writers 
of the history of that period. 

" I hope to meet my end with calmness. Do not let us speak 
of the men into whose hands I have fallen. They thirst for my 
blood, they shall have it. God's will be done, I give Him 
thanks. I forgive them all sincerely, but let us say no more 
about them" — these words addressed to Bishop Juxon by 
Charles a few days before his death attest the inherent no- 
bility of his nature. Whatever the life of Charles I. may have 
been, his death was kingly ; and if death is the echo of life 
then, too, his life must have been vocal with virtues. But what 
virtue can outshine or even illumine the black chaos of creed- 
fanaticism, odium, obloquy? What power can break up and 
restore to their original settings the half-truths, untruths, errors 
and lies glitteringly crystalized in history, drama, story and 
song? Does time right ancient wrongs, readjust and make- 
whole torn, century-scattered truths ? We dream so ; we say 
so; but at deepest heart we whisper No. 

With unruffled calmness, with dignity, with kingly grace, 
Charles I. stepped from the opening of what had been in hap- 
pier days his banqueting hall and advanced upon the scaffold. 
In the words of Agnes Strickland : 

" It was past 1 o'clock before the grisly attendants and 
apparatus of the scaffold were ready. Colonel Hacker led the 
king through his former banqueting hall, one of the windows of 
which had originally been contrived to support stands for pub- 
lic pageantries; it had been taken out and led to the platform 
raised in the street. The noble bearing of the King as he 

118 



NASEBY 

stepped on the scaffold, his beaming eyes and high expression, 
were noticed by all who saw him. He looked on all sides for 
his people, but dense masses of soldiery only presented them- 
selves far and near. He was out of hearing of any persons but 
Juxon and Herbert, save those who were interested in his de- 
struction. The soldiers preserved a dead silence; this time 
they did not insult him. The distant populace wept, and oc- 
casionally raised mournful cries in blessings and prayers for 
him. The king uttered a short speech, to point out that every 
institute of the original constitution of England had been sub- 
verted with the sovereign power. While he was speaking some- 
one touched the axe, which was laid enveloped in black crepe 
on the block. The king turned round hastily and exclaimed, 
'Have a care of the axe. If the edge is spoiled it will be the 
worse for me. ' 

' ' The king put up his flowing hair under a cap ; then, turn- 
ing to the executor asked, ' Is any of my hair in the way?' 'I 
beg your majesty to push it more under your cap,' replied the 
man, bowing. The bishop assisted his royal master to do so and 
observed to him: 'There is but one stage more, which, though 
turbulent and troublesome, is yet a very short one. Consider, it 
will carry you a great way — even from earth to heaven.' 'I 
go,' replied the king, 'from a corruptible to an incorruptible 
crown. ' 

" He unfastened his cloak and took off the medallion of the 
order of the Garter. The latter he gave to Juxon, saying with 
emphasis, ' Remember ! ' Beneath the medallion of St. George was 
a secret spring which removed a plate ornamented with lilies, 
under which was a beautiful miniature of his Henrietta. The 
warning word, which has caused many historical surmises, evi- 
dently referred to the fact that he only had parted with the 
portrait of his beloved wife at the last moment of his existence. 
He then took off his coat and put on his cloak, and pointing to 

119 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

the block, said to the executioner: ' Place it so that it will not 
shake.' ' It is firm, sir,' replied the man. ' I shall say a short 
prayer,' said the king, 'and when I hold out my hand thus, 
strike.' The king stood in profound meditation, said a few 
words to himself, looked upward on the heavens, then knelt and 
laid his head on the block. In about a minute he stretched 
out his hands, and his head was severed at one blow." 

Sorrow. 

News travelled slowly in the days of long ago ; and the trial, 
death and burial of Charles I. were over long before intelli- 
gence of the dire happenings in England had been carried into 
France. Queen Henrietta Maria, then in the Louvre Palace, 
Paris, had just received into her motherly arms her second son, 
James, who had successfully passed through the belligerent 
lines and reached safety in Paris. This joy was soon dulled 
into woe. 

Ominous whispers among the Louvre circle and pitying 
glances caused the queen to make inquiries. The worst was soon 
told. The queen had expected imprisonment, perhaps even 
deposition and exile, but death, the official beheading of an 
English sovereign — had not once entered into her mind as 
among the possibilities. The queen sat silent and tearless 
among her sympathizing English attendants. Pere Gamache 
approached. She received him apathetically. Her aunt, the 
Duchess de Vendome, took her hand and held it caressingly — 
but the Queen seemed in a state of frozen woe ; no moan, no sigh, 
no tear. Pere Gamache withdrew unobserved and searching 
through the royal chambers he found the little Princess Hen- 
riette, the four-year-old idol of the once happy Stuart home. 
Leading the child gently by the hand, he returned to the scene 
of grief. 

At the touch of baby hands, the impress of childish kisses, 

120 



NASEBY 

the unhappy Queen seemed slowly to come back to life even 
as it was, and clasping her little daughter in rapturous tender- 
ness to her breast she wept. Long and wildly she wept and the 
frightened child weeping responsively and clinging helplessly to 
her bosom saved her at last to sanity and to heroic endurance. 

Tennyson has beautifully expressed this power of childish love 
and helplessness to save a mother from despair: 

Home they brought her warrior dead; 

She nor swoon'd, nor utter'd cry. 
All her maidens, watching said, 

"She must weep or she will die." 

Then they praised him, soft and low, 

Called him worthy to be loved, 
Truest friend and noblest foe; 

Yet she neither spoke nor moved. 

Stole a maiden from her place. 

Lightly to the warrior stept 
Took the face-cloth from his face; 

Yet she neither moved nor wept. 

Rose a nurse of ninety years. 

Set his child upon her knee — 
Like summer tempest came her tears — 

"Sweet my child, I live for thee." 

A few days later the Queen withdrew from the French court 
for a brief period of retirement and prayer in the Carmelite 
Convent. 

Milton. 

While the drama in high places was playing before the 
world, a more enduring side scene was enacting in a quiet 
English home. John Milton, in political disgrace, in sorrow of 
soul, and in total blindness was dictating to his daughters the 
lines of "Paradise Lost." Cromwell and his Roundheads, the 
Merry Monarch and his dissolute court, James II. and his sor- 

121 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

rows, have passed away; the visions seen by the blind old bard 
remain. 

As literary immortality is the highest prize that fate holds 
for mortals it is fitting that the cost of attainment should be 
proportionately high. And in this adjustment fate is inexorable. 
Heart's blood and tears wrought into a book give it enduring 
qualities: much, much; little, little; some, some; none, none, 
The dictum of Horace in the olden day, Si vis me flere, etc., is 
still the exponent of an author's power. 

That poem by Mrs. Browning, "A Musical Instrument," has 
fixed in rainbow evanescence — a Thoughts' Niagara Bridal Veil 
— ten thousand blending, blinding truths and beauties that prose 
could never hold or catch. 

Is the prize worth the price? In itself. No; but in the 
soul-growth that its mastery implies and in the soul-wealth that 
it makes one's own forever and ever. Yes. Then, too, they to 
whom Fame shines as an ever luring star, urging on, on, in- 
cessantly even through blood and tears, are so formed by their 
fate that the prize seems to them worth while ; its winning seems 
life 's only good, its loss, life 's supreme sorrow. ' ' The attractions 
are proportional to the destinies." 

So who shall judge his unknown neighbor? Who shall justly 
say. Thou fool to the man who must needs follow his fate? 
Who shall justly pity him whose poverty, disgrace, bitterness 
of heart, and blindness of soul and body — lead to the star- 
luring heights of literary immortality? 

Milton was Latin secretary under Oliver Cromwell and a 
man of great influence at the court. He shared in the amnesty 
proclaimed by Charles II. at the Restoration. Milton's re- 
maining years were spent in retirement and literary labors. 

The return of the Stuarts shattered all his hopes, religious 
and political. He seemed to see in the Stuart restoration the 

122 



NASEBY 

first gathering gloom of a darkness which should overwhelm him- 
self, England, and all the earth. Subjectively this was true. 
Milton never saw beyond that gathering cloud; and when the 
culminant blackness of his own blindness closed in upon him, 
then, too, into a common gloom sank Milton, England and all 
the earth. 

"And darkness shows us worlds by night 
We never see by day." 

Would Paradise Lost have been born into literature if Mil- 
ton had not become blind? 

Would we of today find congenial that Milton of the old 
Puritanical day? Do we admire the Miltonic God? Milton 
liked best his Lucifer, and that liking elusively throbs through 
Paradise Lost and elicits response. 

Charles II. 

There must have been a great measure of compensation to 
Charles I. in the filial devotion of his household. It is related 
that Prince Charles, eldest son, and heir apparent to the throne, 
sent to his father, when in prison, a document carte hlanche 
signed with his name. And in a letter enclosed the Prince as- 
sured his father that whatever conditions he should see fit to 
make with Cromwell and his followers relative to the succession 
would be agreeable to him, in token whereof he had signed his 
name to the document. There was something heroic in that, and 
something even more magnanimously heroic in the response of 
Charles I. He at once tore the document to pieces, fearing that 
the enemy might get possession of it and make use of it against 
Prince Charles. He wrote tenderly to his son, admitting the 
pleasure his generous offer had given, but declaring that death 
would be preferable to any act whereby the rights of his chil- 
dren should be tampered with or signed away. 

123 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

It is well to note these nobler actions and emotions in the 
lives of kings: the ambitious selfishness and cruelty of a Mac- 
beth, a King John, a Richard III. are pedestaled for all the 
world to see ; why not the mutual magnanimity of the Stuarts ? 
Truly the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oftimes 
interred with their bones. 

At the death of Cromwell, after a five years' stormy reign 
as Lord Protector of England, and after a twelve years 'exile of 
the family of Charles I., the people of England unanimously wel- 
comed the restoration of the Stuarts. Charles II. — known in 
France under this title since the death of Charles I. — was 
crowned King of England. 

The times were troubled. Roundhead and Cavalier still stood 
at misunderstanding enimity one directly opposed to the other 
and never the twain might meet. The pendulum swung with 
bewildering rapidity from harshly somber Cromwellian Puri- 
tanism to the excessive dissipation of the Court of the Merry- 
Monarch : the country followed the pendulum. 

Charles II., while humane on the whole, and more inclined 
to ease and pleasure than to troublesome revenge, yet displayed 
a touch of the savage in his treatment of the body of Oliver 
Cromwell. He ordered that it be disinterred and the head struck 
off. This was done ; and the ghastly head of the man who had 
ruled England with a rod of iron for five years, was fastened 
to the gibbet at Tyburn. 

Horrible is the hat« which pursues its victim beyond death 
and wreaks vengeance upon an unresisting mass of putre- 
faction! All such excesses, no matter by whom committed or 
under what provocation, are atavistic expressions of the jackal 
and the tiger in the heart of man. 

Truly there is no eye that can foresee the future ! Cromwell, 
passing for the thousandth time through the thoroughfare of 

124 



NASEBY 

Tyburn, saw not there his own head fastened to a gibbet. 
Charles I., at the stately banquet board of Whitehall Palace, 
saw not the great end Avindow of the hall opening upon the 
scaffold. And we, secure in the hour, see not that other hour 
of fatal import that yet shall be; and — 'tis well. 

Death of Queen Henrietta. 

Queen Henrietta Maria was not present at the scenes of ac- 
clamation which welcomed the return of her son, Charles II. 
She was at that time happily absorbed in the forth-coming mar- 
riage of her charming daughter, the Princess Henriette Maria, 
to Philip, Duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XIV. 

Some time later Queen Henrietta Maria went to England. 
She resided there three years, but her heart's best interests were 
in sunny France where her idolized daughter, the Duchess of 
Orleans, moved amid the gay court of Versailles as its chief 
honor and ornament. Charles II. and his wife, Catherine, of 
Braganza, reluctantly bade farewell to the Queen-mother after 
accompanying her as far as the Nore ; but doubtless there was 
secret joy in the heart of Henrietta Maria as the foggy shores 
of England receded from view and France arose in expectancy. 

Then, too, all seemed calm in England; Charles II. and his 
wife were high in popular favor. Her second son, James, Duke 
of York, was happily married and surrounded by a promising 
family. James' eldest daughter, the Lady Mary, later Queen 
Mary II. of England, was a great favorite with the affectionate 
grandmother, Henrietta Maria. Anne, James' second daughter, 
afterward Queen Anne of England, was also attached to the 
kindly old Queen-mother. 

The old-age years of Henrietta Maria rolled on in com- 
parative happiness. Some lives seem to have their sorrows 
scattered uniformly over the years, a gentle drizzle, never dazz- 

125 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

ling sun-light; other lives are marked by dynamic contrasts — 
brilliancy, ecstatic light suddenly blackened by tornado blasts 
and torn by lurid lightning, and after that, calm again and 
even the bright light . 

Queen Henrietta Maria's tornado blast and searing lightning 
flash came full upon her when her husband was beheaded; her 
later years were calmly happy. In philanthropic labors, in the 
exercise of all the gentle charities of the Christian heart, in the 
hopeful fulfihnent of religious obligations, the old age years 
drifted calmly to the great Calm. 

It chanced that at that time the use of opium as a sedative, 
narcotic, and harmless medicine was in vogue at the court. M. 
Valot, favorite physician of Louis XIV., ordered it for the 
Queen. In the best of spirits and laughing at the supposed 
wonderful qualities of the new panacea, Henrietta Maria took 
the prescribed drug. An hour later she fell into a peaceful 
slumber; the night passed and the day passed, and still she 
slept. Alarm was felt, her son-in-law, the Duke of Orleans, was 
soon at her bedside ; the little granddaughter, Anne, was brought 
near in hopes of arousing the dormant sensibilities — but in vain. 
Queen Henrietta had sunk into the calm; it was too good to 
leave; she stayed, sank deeper, deeper, and with a little sigh of 
relief she died. 

Bossuet's Sermon. 

Jacques Benigne Bossuet, the eloquent pulpit orator of the 
court of Louis XIV., added a classic to French literature in his 
masterly discourse at the obsequies of Henrietta Maria. It was 
delivered in the convent chapel of the nuns of the Visitation of 
Chaillot, whom the late Queen particularly favored, and for 
whom she had founded the convent. 

The nobility of France were gathered together on this occas- 
ion, the "most illustrious assembly of the world" sat spell- 

126 



NASEBY 

bound under the eloquence of the "Eagle of Meaux. " Bossuet 
had proved equal to his opportunity. 

Perhaps, though, Bossuet is better known today by that other 
funeral oration delivered some months later at the obsequies of 
Queen Henrietta Maria's youngest daughter, Henriette of Eng- 
land, Duchess of Orleans. 

When the old die, well — there can be no Shelleyan lamenta- 
tion. 

"Grief made the young Spring wild, 
And she threw down her opening buds 
As if she autumn were and they dead leaves." 

— Shelley 

The young spring may, indeed, thus lavishly lament for the 
young, but not for the old. When a poet Keats, aged twenty-six, 
lies brokenheartedly and beautifully dead ; when a queenly wo- 
man, wife and bereaved mother, aged twenty-eight, lies pathetic- 
ally dead — oh, then, all that Shelley may poetically declare, all 
that Bossuet may magically proclaim, seem fitting and just and 
true. "We understand the young Spring tantrums; and the sob- 
bings of the buds as roughly sundered from the grief -swept trees, 
seem strangely familiar, as though ages ago we ourselves had 
thus wildly wept when the world was young. 

Wealth, station, honor, health, happiness, youth, beauty, love 
— today ; and the tomb tomorrow ! This contrast has ever most 
forcefully appealed to the human heart. Bossuet knew full well 
the force of this appeal and again the orator and the occasion 
were well met. 

"0 vanity," he exclaimed, "0 nothingness! mortals, ig- 
norant of their destiny! Ten months ago would she have be- 
lieved it ? And you, my hearers, would you have thought, while 
she was shedding so many tears in this place, while I was dis- 
charging a like office for the Queen, her mother — that she would 
so soon assemble you here to deplore her own loss? 'Vanity of 

127 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

vanities; all is vanity.' Nothing is left for me to say but that; 
that is the only sentiment which, in presence of so strange a 
casualty, grief so well grounded and so poignant permits me to 
indulge. No; after what we have just seen, health is but a 
name, life is but a dream, glory is but a shadow, charms and 
pleasures are but a dangerous diversion." 

Reflections. 

"Keep cool, it will be all one in a hundred years." So we 
say to others, so we try to persuade ourselves; but the tempestu- 
ous teapot seems fatally fixed over the live coals of life and the 
teapot tempest must as fatally follow. So mightily important, so 
imperative, so irresistibly puissant were those seeming geyser- 
forces in their day; perhaps we who laugh at their spent spray 
would more wisely learn the lessons they may teach us. 

But just as a matter of spent spray and evanishing irides- 
cence, those struggles of the long ago seem magically beautiful ; 
and the men and women who figured prominently in them 
seem to peer through the mdst even as flame-light from which 
flame has fled, even as pictured pain, reflex sorrows, unrealities 
— spray-shrouded, color-clouded. Cleopatra, nobly dead, a Queen 
forever ; ugly old Socrates growing humanly dear and beautiful 
to all the ages as he drinks the poison-hemlock ; Marie Antoinette, 
in the tumbril, at the guillotine, under the glittering blade : 
Charles I. upon the scaffold, on the block awaiting the heads- 
man's blow — these things have been, but now they are not; 
yet they endure. 



128 



Chapter XIII. 

BLENHEIM 

Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet — somehow 
these names lie contiguous in the mind ; so stored away, per- 
haps, in the brain cells long ago, and thus forever associa- 
tive. 

Where is all that we know when it is not in play upon the 
plane of consciousness? Where is the music of a Rachmaninoff 
— while he sleeps? the reminiscent wealth of a Gladstone — while 
he plays with his great grandchild? the genius of an Edgar 
Allan Poe — while narcotic night silences the streets of Balti- 
more? 

"Potentially down in subconsciousness," says my glib 
psychologist. Eloquent answer! But where and what is sub- 
consciousness ? 

Better is it silently to gaze wide-eyed, sincere, perplexed into 
the omnipresent I -do-not -know, than to squirrel gyrate in the 
old vicious circle, or to cob-web life-deep chaos with verbiage, 
subterfuge, and explanations that do not explain. 

Blenheim, cumulatively at least, stands for the first and 
fatal blow that fortune dealt to her fair haired favorite Louis 
le Grand. The treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastadt (1714) 
were an appalling humiliation to the Grand Monarch who had 
imperiously dictated the conditions of Aix-la-Chapelle and 
Nimeguen. 

"There are no longer any Pyrenees", said Louis XIV., arbiter 
of Europe, as his grandson, a boy of seventeen, was raised to 

129 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

the throne as Philip V. of Spain. And then all Europe flew to 
arms and for thirteen years blood flowed and war dogs killed 
one another because that boy was on the throne and Louis' 
witty words had razed the Pyrennees. 

This war is known as the War of the Spanish Succession. 
A second Grand Alliance was formed; England, Holland, 
Sweden, Savoy, Austria fought against France. The famous 
English general, Marlborough, and Prince Eugene of Savoy, in 
the service of the Emperor, won the memorable battles, Blenheim, 
Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet. 

The allies chose for the Spanish throne, the Archduke 
Charles, of Austria, the second son of the Emperor Leopold I. : 
but when after ten years' fighting there was a vacancy in the 
imperial line and Archduke Charles suddenly became Emperor 
of Austria, the allies, fearing the preponderance of Austria in 
European affairs, withdrew their claim. Philip V. grandson of 
Louis XIV., was permitted to remain upon the throne of Spain. 

The war ended disadvantageously for Prance. Philip 
V. was obliged to renounce his claims to the succession in 
France, so that France and Spain might never be under the 
same monarch; and thus by miracle-words the august Pyrenees 
were reinstated (of course they had been deeply disturbed and 
were, in consequence, duly grateful!) England obtained Gib- 
raltar and the island Minorca ; the Duke of Savoy was rewarded 
with the island Sicily, and Austria obtained Milan, Naples, 
Sardinia, and part of the Netherlands. 

Thirteen years of bloodshed for the whim of an ambitious 
old man ! And thousands fell on both sides, who if questioned, 
could not honestly have told why they were killing one another. 

" 'Now tell us all about the war. 

And what they fought each other for?' 
Young Peterkin he cries. 

While little Wilhelmine looks up with wonder waiting eye*- " 
• * * * « 



130 



BLENHEIM 

" 'It was the English', Caspar said, 
Who put the French to rout. 
But what they fought each other for — 
I couldn't well make out: 
But things like that, you know, must be 
At every famous victory." 

— Southey. 

And the world is as fatuous as Southey 's old "Caspar", and 
we of the awakening twentieth century are sorely perplexed 
"Peterkins". Why must things like that be; and why do men 
speak of successful human slaughter as a "famous victory"; 
and why do martial music and blare of trumpet and drum and 
epaulettes and ribbons and medals and barbaric pomp in 
general — succeed in silencing the death groans and in hiding 
from view the bloody agonies and the demon horrors of the battle 
field? 

"Why 'twas a very wicked thing" 

Quoth little Wilhelmine. 
"Nay, nay, my little girl", said he, 
"It was a famous victory." 
"But what good came of it at last"? 
* * # * « 

"Why, that I cannot tell", said he, 
"But 'twas a famous victory." 

And the voice of the questioning child is lost in answerless 
fatuity. When will the world hear and honestly answer? 

Louis XIV. 

Louis le Grand, greatest of the Bourbons, lived too long. For 
seventy-two years (1643-1775) Louis was king and for, at least, 
fifty years his power was absolute. 

Louis' long reign had as contemporary English history the 
disastrous Civil War and the beheading of Charles I. (1649) ; 
the Cromwellian Protectorate (1653) ; the Restoration of the 
Stuarts (1660) ; the reign of the Merry Monarch, the misfortunes 
of James II., the revolution of 1688, the battle of the Boyne, and 

131 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

the final deposition and expulsion of James II. ; the accession to 
the throne of England as King William III., of Louis' most in- 
veterate foe, William, Prince of Orange (1688) ; the death of 
King WiUiam III. (1702) ; the reign of Queen Anne, her death, 
and the beginning of the House of Hanover (1715). 

On the continent the Thiry Years ' War was happily ended by 
the treaty of Westphalia (1648). Peter the Great ascended the 
throne of Russia (1682). In the great battle of Pultowa (1709) 
the power of Sweden was practically annihilated ; the madly vic- 
torious career of Charles XII. of Sweden was stopped, and his 
successes together with the more solid attainments of his 
predecessor, Gustavus Adolphus, were rendered negative ; Rus- 
sia advanced over her prostrate foe to her place among the 
nations. 

For forty years success, pleasure, honor, power, and glory 
beamed in full radiance upon Louis — both as man and monarch. 
Had he died even as late as 1702 when William, his great rival 
foe, died, Louis would have been, to all appearances, the most 
blessed of mortals and his reign the most glorious in the an- 
nals of France. 

If Pompey the Great had died on his triumphal return from 
the Mithradatic war, his life would have been esteemed singularly 
happy and free from the reverses and misfortunes that are the 
ordinary lot of mortals. But Pompey lived to see all his blush- 
ing honors grow gray, as the admiring eyes that had once 
adoringly gazed upon Pompey the Great turned from him, the 
setting sun, to the dazzling effulgence of the rising orb, Cains 
Julius Caesar. Pharsalia lay in that alienating gaze and as- 
sassination and bloody death. 

The last years of liouis XIV. were burdened with many mis- 
eries. His fortitude and magnanimity under these crushing 
blows form, perhaps, his best claim to the title Great. The War 
of the Spanish Succession ended with the humiliating treaty of 

132 



BLENHEIM 

Utrecht. Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet had, in 
great measure, swept away all that the successful years had, with 
blood and treasure, attained. But it was in his domestic 
relations that the aged monarch was most sorely afflicted. The 
Dauphin died, and a few months later his second son, the Duke 
of Burgundy, Fenelon 's favorite pupil, died ; Adelaide of Savoy, 
wife of the Duke of Burgundy, soon followed her husband to the 
grave ; their two sons yet lived, and of these, the elder, a promis- 
ing youth, died suddenly and there remained only a delicate 
infant — the future Louis XV. 

Louis bore all these sorrows with fortitude and sublime 
resignation. In the same stoic or heroic attitude of mind he 
looked forward into the gathering darkness of death. There is 
something truly great in the man who can suffer cataclysmic 
misfortunes and deny to himself the relief of a cry of complaint. 

Louis died calmly at Versailles, Sept. 1, 1715. His last words 
were to his little grandson, a frail boy of five years; sadly the 
dying monarch said, "My child, you are about to become a 
great king. Do not imitate me either in my taste for building 
or in my love of war. Endeavor on the contrary to live in peace 
with the neighboring nations. Render to God all that you owe 
to him and cause his name to be honored by your subjects. 
Strive also to relieve the burdens of your people which I myself 
have been unable to do." 

And with this futile advice carrying with it his own con- 
fession of failure Louis le Grand died. The king is dead — 
long live the king ! 



133 



Chapter XIV. 

PULTOWA 

Russia came into existence as a nation on the day of the 
victory of the Muscovite troops under Peter the First over the 
Swedes and allies under Charles XII. of Sweden, at Pultowa, A. 
D. 1709. What Russia has attained to since that date is known 
and startling significant; what she was previous to that date is 
insignificant. 

As Creasy says: "Yet a century and a half (two centuries) 
have hardly elapsed since Russia was first recognized as a mem- 
ber of the drama of modern European history — , previous to the 
battle of Pultowa, Russia played no part. Charles V. and his 
great rival (Francis I.), our Elizabeth and her adversary Philip 
of Spain, the Guises, Sully, Richelieu, Cromwell, De Witt, Will- 
iam of Orange, and the other leading spirits of the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries, thought no more about the Musco- 
vite Czar than we now think about the King of Timbuctoo. " 

Sweden lost on that dread day when "fortune fled the royal 
Swede", all that she had toilsomely gained thro' the slow cen- 
turies. At one blow her fairest provinces were torn from her; 
and the rival Russian throne ascended to European prominence 
over the prostrate power of Sweden. 

Peter the Great even upon the field of victory fully realized 
that Pultowa was for him the key to the Baltic. Even amid the 
carnage of the slaughter field where ten thousand men lay dying 
or dead and the Vorksla river ran red, his eagle gaze beheld the 
Russia resultant from the Treaty of Nystadt. Exultantly he 
cried out that "the sun of the morning had fallen from 

134 



PULTOWA 

Heaven, and the foundation of St. Petersburg at length stood 
firm." 

From dread Pultowa 's day even to the hour, Russia has stead- 
ily advanced by slow, gigantic strides unto a dominating promi- 
nence among the family of nations. The cabinets of Turkey, 
Austria, Germany, Italy, France, and England are secretly tho' 
effectively influenced by Russia. 

Republic or Empire. 

Napoleon said that all Europe would ultimately become 
either Muscovite or Republican. Which shall it be? The ans- 
wer as deduced from present tendencies might be — Republican : 
but no thoughtful observer can fail to regard attentively and 
apprehensively that sullen Sclavonic dominance extending insid- 
iously and simultaneously into India, Persia, Mongolia, Turkey, 
the Balkans, and Central Europe. 

Amalgamation, the mergence of the many into one, sameness 
— quiescent and content under a powerful, capable, and just ad- 
ministration, seem to bo and ever to have been the ideal form of 
government. The empires of the past — Egyptian, Babylonian, 
Persian, Grecian, Roman; the Holy Roman Empire and the 
Socialistic commune of the future — all include as fundamental 
principle this solidarity. So far, indeed, it has proved a marsh- 
light leading to the marsh; but we dream that it will yet lead 
out of and beyond the muddy, bloody marsh and ultimately light 
up millennial realms of world-wide oneness, goodness, gladness, 
peace. 

Charles XII. of Sweden. 

"When Charles set out on that expedition having for its ob- 
ject the castigation and possible subjugation of the upstart 
Tartar hordes weakly held together by Peter of Russia, — all 

135 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

Europe believed that Charles would briefly and successfully 
accomplish that object. 

Sweden was then a power for whose alliance and friendly 
interest the most powerful monarchs of Europe contended. Louis 
XIV. of France sought the aid of Charles in the war then 
waging between France and England; and Marlborough, leader 
of the English forces in France, went personally to the court of 
Charles in order to solicit that monarch's aid or at least his 
neutrality in the great struggle then in progress. 

Charles himself was fully confident of victory; and in his 
romantic plans drawn up for the future, the overthrow of Peter 
formed only an episode. A year, perhaps, would be required 
for the full accomplishment of the Russian enterprise; then he, 
Charles of Sweden, victor of Moscow and arbiter from the 
Kremlin, would hastily return to western Europe and begin 
preparations on a gigantic scale for his master-achievement — 
the dethronement of the Pope of Rome, and the demolition of 
the Papacy. 

Desire-dream of many; achievement of none: for this magic 
Gibraltar elusively endures bearing its age-old scars as brightest 
ornamentations. Charles XII. did not, indeed, attack Rome ; but 
did Pultowa save the Papacy ? No : the missiles of the Madman 
of the North whether hurled in the real or only in that futile 
future plan, would have been equally ineffectual; the magic 
rock would, perhaps bear another scar bright shining today as 
trophy of its past struggle and victory. 

The lesson of history would seem to teach mortals to expect 
the unexpected. At Saratoga, at Valmy, at Pultowa, in the 
Teutoberger Wald, at Marathon, and at Babylon — the undream- 
ed of, the altogether unanticipated, unprepared for, both by the 
combatants themselves and the world-spectators — took place. 

Charles XII., who had set out from Sweden with an army 

136 



PULTOWA 

of eighty-live thousand men, Swedes and allies, escaped from the 
shambles of Pultowa only by swimming across a river red with 
blood and thus reaching an alien shore weak, wounded, a fugitive, 
and comparatively alone. Eighty-five thousand men died for the 
gratification of the personal ambition of the Swedish king ; and, 
by the irony of fate, for the ruination of their native land and 
the aggrandizement of Peter the First, subsequently and, per- 
haps, consequently Peter the Great, of Russia. 

Sclavonic versus Teutonic. 

The battle of Pultowa was the first decisive victory of the 
Sclavonic race over the Germanic. Arnold, in his Lectures on 
Modern History, says that the last chapter of the history of 
Europe will narrate the achievements leading to Muscovite 
ascendency and the glories of world-dominant Panslavism. 

Do nations and races attain only to a certain degree of ex- 
cellence and then deteriorate? And is that the plan fatefuUy 
fixed for the planet Earth? Mycena, Troy, Philas, Babylon, 
Athens make answer in the affirmative. 

A poem, Christ in the Universe, by Alice Meynell comes to 
mind. In a few master touches the writer describes God's way 
of revealing Himself to us mortals: 

"With the ambiguous earth 
His dealings have been told us; these abide: 
The signal to a maid, the human birth, 
The lesson, and the Young Man crucified." 

But do the other planets of our solar system, do the stars, 
those countless suns controlling countless planets — know aught 
of God's way of dealing with our Earth? Or can we even in 
loftiest flight of thought conceive "in what guise He walked the 
Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear?" 

Then the good glad confidence of the soul in touch with Grod, 

137 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

in tune with the Infinite, in Te Deum ecstacy of exultation, over- 
flows in the concluding lines: 

"Oh, be prepared, my soul; 
To read the unconceivable, to scan 
The million foi-ms of God those stars unroll 
When in our turn we show to them — a Man." 

They are indeed blessed in whom dwells this abiding con- 
fidence, and for whom at times at least, there is overflow in Te 
Deum exaltation. The slaughter-fields of history and rivers 
rolling red ; the answerless Whys wailing from out the past for- 
lorn as Pharaoh-ghosts in search of non-existent mummies; the 
chaos of it all, from Memphis to modern Cairo; the damnable 
wrongs, the demon cruelties, the awful sufferings, the hellish 
horrors — all sound sonoral in orchestral harmony when faith 
and hope and good glad confidence play dominant and the soul 
is exultant in God. 

Death op Charles. 

Charles XII. never rallied from the defeat of Pultowa. He 
did, indeed, linger for a time in Turkey, striving to enlist the 
sympathies of the Sultan in his behalf. And history relates 
that at last the Sultan yielded to the importunities of Charles, 
and that an army was fitted out for the invasion of Russia : but 
the command of the forces was entrusted to the Vizier, not to 
Charles. And the story runs that the Russians were completely 
trapped by the Turkish troops and Pultowa seemed about to be 
avenged and the hand of destiny turned backward; when 
Catherine, later the wife of Peter the Great and first Empress of 
Russia, seeing the hopelessness of exit from the trap into which 
the Russians had fallen, went secretly by night into the tent 
of the Grand Vizier, and by her charms, and by her gifts of 
gold, diamonds, and pearls bribed the stern old soldier so that 
he failed to see the following day that the Russians were secretly 
stealing away from the trap in which he had caught them. 

138 



PULTOWA 

Charles withdrew to Sweden and, a war having broken out 
between Norway and Sweden, he was killed at the siege of 
Frederickshall : but just how he met death is not authoritatively 
known. He was found dead in the trenches the night preceding 
the battle. 

Voltaire has sympathetically told the story of Charles XII. 
of Sweden. His meteoric career has often been used, as John- 
son happily said, "to point a moral or adorn a tale." He 
ranks with Alexander and Napoleon in personal magnetism, in 
phenomenal attainment, and in the ultimate loss and evanish- 
ment of all attained. His name and fame are ever subtly sug- 
gestive of — 

Dread Pultowa's day 
When fortune left the royal Swede; 
Around a slaughtered army lay 
No more to combat and to bleed; 
The power and fortune of the war 
Had passed to the triumphant Czar. 

— Byron. 



i;5!j 



Chapter XV. 

SARATOGA 

The surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga, though not, 
perhaps, properly classed among battles, is, nevertheless, prop- 
erly classed among events momentous in their influence upon the 
destinies of nations. Looking upon the American Revolution as 
a whole and from a dispassionate distance, Burgoyne 's surren- 
der at Saratoga is seen to be the fateful turning of the tide which 
rolled from crest-wave English victory back to slow but sure 
English discomfiture and ultimate defeat. 

As result of the Colonial victory at Saratoga came recog- 
nition of the Independent United States of America, first from 
France, later from Spain, and still later from Holland. Confi- 
dence was established ; untried troops had stood breast to breast 
against veterans of the British army, against skilled Grenadiers, 
and these untried troops had won; they had caused the proud 
British general to retreat from place to place, they had sur- 
rounded him at last on Saratoga Heights and forced him to 
capitulate. The independence of the thirteen original states 
and all evolutionary Republican America lay potential in the 
victory of Generals Gates and Arnold over Burgoyne and his 
veterans at Saratoga. 

Plan. 

"The best laid plans of mice and men 
Gang aft agley." — Bums. 

Burgoyne 's plan was good; and had not General St. Leger 
failed to capture Fort Stanwix and then to proceed along the 
Mohawk to its confluence with the Hudson and there join his 

140 



SARATOGA 

force to that of Burgoyne ; and had not General Baum failed to 
win the battle of Bennington and so secure the magazines of 
provisions so sorely needed by the British army; and had not 
Lord Howe considered it more advantageous to cross over to the 
Delaware and attack Philadelphia, rather than remain at New 
York ready for emergency; and had not General Clinton been 
retarded in his victorious advance up from Albany; if all, or 
perhaps any one of these conditions had been the reverse of 
what they were, why, history might be the reverse of what it is. 

Momentous little things — so seeming trifling, inconsequen- 
tial, neglegible — and yet potential of cataclysmic calamity ! An 
insect bores into the heart of an oak, and the forest monarch 
falls: a tiny trickling rill freezes in the rock and the mountain 
is rent asunder; a pir.e twig breaks under its weight of snow 
and the awful avalanche comes crashing down. In the moral 
world, too, the results seem altogether out of proportion to the 
cause : a glance of suspicion and the bloom of perfect trust is 
gone from the heart forever; an unkind word and love withers, 
a deed — it dies; one lie, one little wormy lie, and the fair in- 
tegrity of character has in it the boring insect with which it 
may, indeed, flourish full foliage for a season, but by which, in 
the end, it must, being hollow hearted, succumb to the storm 
and fall and die. 

Perhaps when Burgoyne sent for the Indians and made them 
part of his fighting force, he then admitted into his moral make- 
up, as well as his military, the mighty little thing which should 
silently yet forcefully work disaster. For many men who were 
irresolute as to which side to join, being indeed loyal at heart 
to the mother country and hesitating to strike against her, boldly 
threw in their fortunes with the Colonists when they heard that 
the Red Man formed part of the force of the advancing army. 
They knew what savage warfare meant even better than Bur- 
goyne knew. Many are inclined to excuse Burgoyne on the plea 

141 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

that he knew nothing of the horrible atrocities of the Indians 
when intoxicated with the blood of battle : but fate did not ex- 
cuse him. His Indians never knew the intoxication of victorious 
battle — thanks to the stern resolution of men who fought in de- 
fence of mothers, sisters, wives, and children shuddering in near- 
by homes : and as defeat came and ignominious retreat from post 
to post before the enraged advance of a conquering foe, the In- 
dians deserted the army and slunk away through the western 
wilds back to their native tribes. 

Benedict Arnold. 

Strange that history remembers only Arnold the Traitor and 
not Arnold the hero of Ticonderoga, Quebec, and Saratoga. Too 
bad he didn't die in that briUiant charge upon Burgoyne's in- 
trenchments, where after overcoming all obstacles and apparent- 
ly just on the point of victory he was wounded in the same leg 
that had been painfully injured in the assault on Quebec — and 
carried fainting and profusely bleeding from the field. To be 
twice wounded for a cause and then to betray it — perverse hu- 
man heart, who shall know its depths of perversity ! 

And yet the events since that time, which Arnold could not 
foresee or foreknow, rather than the concomitant circumstances 
of that time, which Arnold saw and knew, have proclaimed him 
Traitor, And had the results been otherwise, had not his own 
mad efforts helped turn the tide at Saratoga, Arnold might now 
be known as a shrewdly diplomatic young officer who, influenc- 
ed by a beautiful Tory wife and seeing the cause of the Colon- 
ists desperate, had timely transferred his allegiance to the 
British army and bravely helped along the conquering cause of 
the mother country. 

And Major Andre sleeps in honored rest in old Westminster 
Abbey ; while the man twice wounded in battle, the hero of Ticon- 
deroga, Quebec, and Saratoga sleeps in an unhonored grave hav- 

142 



SARATOGA 

ing as epitaph indelibly traced upon surrounding air and earth 
and water and sky — Arnold the Traitor. 

General Frazer. 

General Frazer was mortally wounded in the engagement 
which took place October 7th. He died in camp the following 
day. The Italian historian Botta gives the following account of 
his burial. ' ' Toward midnight, the body of General Frazer was 
buried in the British camp. His brother officers assembled sadly 
around while the funeral service was read over the remains of 
their brave comrade, and his body was committed to the hostile 
earth. The ceremony, always mournful and solemn of itself, 
was rendered even terrible by the sense of recent losses, of pres- 
ent and future dangers, and of regret for the deceased. Mean- 
while, the blaze and roar of the American artillery amid the 
natural darkness and stillness of the night came on the senses 
with startling awe. The grave had been dug within range of the 
enemy's batteries; and while the service was proceeding, a can- 
non ball struck the ground close to the coffin, and spattered earth 
over the face of the officiating chaplain." 

There is something painfully pathetic in the scene thus pre- 
sented to the imagination. War has no respect for the rights of 
the living or the dying or the dead. 

Surrender. 

On the 13th of October, 1777, General Burgoyne, besieged by 
overpowering numbers on the heights of Saratoga and seeing 
that his array was facing disease and famine, and being unable 
to establish communication either with Lord Howe or with Gen- 
eral Clinton — opened negotiations with General Gates as to con- 
ditions of surrender. 

143 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

At first General Gates demanded that the royal army should 
surrender themselves prisoners of war. Burgoyne refused. 

It was later agreed upon that "the troops under General 
Burgoyne were to march out of their camp with the honors of 
war, and the artillery — of the entrenchments, to the verge of the 
river, where the arms and the artillery were to be left. The 
arms to be piled by word of command from their own officers. 
A free passage was to be granted to the army under Lieutenant 
General Burgoyne to Great Britain upon condition of not serv- 
ing again in North America during the present contest." 

These conditions having been formally accepted, an army of 
weak and wounded men laboriously descended the heights and 
marched out to the place appointed for the laying down of arms. 
General Gates was on this occasion extremely courteous, and 
the Colonial troops were soon fraternizing with the English 
soldiers and striving in every way to supply their many needs 
and wants 

General Clinton who was but fifty miles down the river with 
supplies and men, heard with dismay of Burgoyne 's surrender. 
Lord Howe's plans were all broken up by this sudden change 
of fortune. And the far away, sleepily stubborn British Parlia- 
ment felt the first cold intimation that it might possibly be 
wrong and Burke might possibly be right in their respective 
estimates of the rebel children in the wide awake, wonderful 
New World. 

And so the failure of the New York plans culminating in 
Burgoyne 's surrender at Saratoga, proved to be one of the 
mighty little things potential of results that change the destinies 
of nations. 



144 



Chapter XVI. 

VALMY 

"Bury my heart in Valmy," said Kellerman, soldier of the 
Seven Years' War, victor of Valmy, Marshal of France under 
the first Napoleon, and court favorite of the Bourbons — as the 
shadows of old-age death deepened into darkness. And they 
buried his heart in Valmy. 

A simple monument on the crest of the hill, the bloodiest spot 
of the one-time battle ground, tells to the thoughtful stranger 
the story of a restless heart o'er whom as o'er Madame de Stael 
and many another heir of a checkered heritage might be en- 
graved as epitaph, "Here rests one who never rested." 

The era ushered in by the battle of Valmy was especially 
prolific of men whose political principles changed violently from 
one extreme to the other; only to rebound again and again, 
until, at length, weariness and cynic scorn of good in anything 
caused them to drift in perplexed acquiescence wherever the 
tide rolled longest and strongest. Talleyrand, Dumouriez, Mar- 
quis de la Rouarie, Kellerman, La Fayette, Mirabeau, Due de 
Chartres, and even Napoleon Bonaparte were, in great measure, 
moulded into their respective historic moulds by the lurid 
lightning play of antithetic forces ever fatefuUy flashing and 
slashing and crashing around them. 

September Twentieth. 

Yet in August, 1792, when sixty thousand Prussians, and 
forty thousand Austrians and fifteen thousand of the old French 

145 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

noblesse started out upon that "military promenade to Paris": 
or on the morning of September 20th, when that victoriously 
advancing column prepared gaily for its first skirmish with the 
raw revolutionary levies who filled the passes of the Argonne 
wooded heights and threatened to impede that "promenade" 
— who could see, or who could dare to dream what the issue of 
that encounter would be ; what results would follow ; what rivers 
of blood would flow; what lordly heads would roll from under 
the guillotine; what national madness would break out bark- 
ing at the peace of Europe; what mighty Madman would arise 
urging on that national madness even to Wagram, Austerlitz, 
Moscow, Leipsic, Waterloo! 

Retribution. 

Had Kellerman failed to come up just in time to join forces 
with Dumouriez : had the Prussian advance been just an hour or 
two earlier : had the heavy mists lifted from the Valniy hill and 
Argonne wood revealing the relative positions of Kellerman and 
Dumouriez: had the forcing of the defile by Clairfayt and his 
Austrian corps proved fatally successful: had the Duke of 
Brunswick resolutely charged a second time up that hill of 
bristling bayonets: had the King of Prusia, urged on by a 
vision of the future, authoritatively commanded that the hill 
be taken and himself led the charge: ah! so we learnedly say 
from the calm eminence far away, but history is made in the 
low blind fury of the fray. Perhaps, too, there were potently at 
work upon that fated battlefield, forces that elude the gaze of 
the dreamer on the height far away: — a determining animus, 
moral and spiritual potencies formed by the slow centuries and 
long controlled, but now liberated and wildly free. Ghosts of 
ten thousand wrongs may have arisen between the gilded ranks 
of the French noUesse and the ragged rows of the Carmagnoles : 
and, as the spirits that arose over the tent of Richard the Third, 

146 



VALMY 

the night before the battle of Bosworth Field, cursed Richard 
and blessed Richmond; threatened Richard with defeat and 
death on the morrow and cheered Richmond with hopes and 
promises of victory; fought intangibly, invisibly, yet potently 
present amid the awful carnage of Bosworth field even until 
death trampled down Richard: so, in like manner, may the 
ghosts of ten thousand wrongs have arisen between the men of 
the old regime and of the rebellious new — ^fighting for their fel- 
low-wrongs still writhing in the flesh, fighting the old, old fight 
of retaliation, compensation, stern adjudication, infinite justice. 
As the sun's rays that reach earth are but one-millionth of the 
rays emitted by the sun, so for every thing known, bright shin- 
ing on the historic page, there are a million things unknown. 

Battle. 

About seven o'clock on that battle morn as the mists were 
dissipating, the successfully united French forces saw with dis- 
may the slowly advancing army of the allies; long lines of 
Prussian cavalry, Austrian light troops, solid columns of in- 
fantry, batteries of artillery filled the valley and moved slowly, 
sinuously toward the Valmy height. 

Dumouriez anxiously scanned the white strained faces of his 
untried troops. Would they fail him in the crucial hour ? "Would 
they break away in panic rout when the death-play began? It 
was their custom. 

"He who fights and runs away 
May live to fight another day." 

At Tournay, at Lille, and in general throughout the opening 
campaign this uncertain "heap of shriekers" had fled away as 
satyrs pursued by Pan when the death-play began. Would the 
Carmagnoles of today, and, at deepest heart, the Jacquerie of 
many a yesterday, dare to fight face to face and hand to hand 

147 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

against the august seignieurs of the old regime — late their dread 
lords and masters ? Three hundred years of culture lay between 
them. 

Of all who took part in the battle that day, either among 
the allies or the revolutionary forces, perhaps not one realized 
the full importance of what had taken place as did Johan Wolf- 
gang von Goethe — then a young man and comparatively un- 
known; he had followed the allies as a spectator, a curious 
seeker of strange scenes, a bold hot-blood eager as his own Wil- 
helm Meister to taste adventure at its source and to know the 
ways of the world in love and in war. Goethe, with the unerring 
insight of genius, perceived that victory to the Carmagnoles 
marked a new era. In his own words to comrades in camp on 
the night following the battle; ''From this place and from this 
day forth commences a new era in the world's history, and you 
can all say you were present at its birth. ' ' 

France a Republic. 

Simultaneously with victory at Valmy, France broke from the 
cocoon of monarchical forms and proclaimed herself a Repub- 
lic. Even while the battle was raging, the National Conven- 
tion in Paris were engaged in this deliberation, this liberation. 
The Republic of France dates from September 20th, 1792. And 
under the regrettable excesses of the Revolution, the reaction- 
ary repression of the First Empire, of the Bourbon restoration, 
the revolt of 1830, of 1848, even to Sedan and the hour— the 
spirit of democracy, of liberty and independence born Sept. 
20th, 1792, has flourished and flourishes indestructibly, imper- 
ishably. 

And yet as Dumouriez said, "France (revolutionary) was 
within a hair's breadth of destruction," And had victory gone 
that day to the allies, the throne of Louis XVI. would have been 
reinstated on foundations so firm that centuries would not shake 

148 



VALMY 

it. For in La Vendee and throughout Brittainy there was at 
that time a strong uprising in favor of the throne : men such 
as the admirable old Marquis de la Rouarie were abandoning 
the Revolutionary cause and turning decisively back to mon- 
archical principles; moreover the recent atrocious September 
massacres had alienated the more conservative and thoughtful 
men throughout France. Never was the time more propitious 
for the return of the mild and humane Louis XVI., the re- 
establishment of the monarchy, the substitution of Reform for 
Revolution, and of concessive peace for fratricidal war. But 
by that hair 's breadth republican France won : and that winning 
mustered out the gentlemanly old regime and ushered in the 
arrogant awful new. 

The spirit of Valmy flies eagle-free over the world today. It 
is the spirit making possible the face to face and hand to hand 
fight between the laborer and the capitalist, the soldier and the 
king, woman and man: and that Spirit tells strange and ter- 
rible tales of victory. 



149 



Chapter XVII. 



WATERLOO 



Waterloo stands for the sudden darkening of the blazing 
comet, Napoleon; and for the return of France to the realm of 
the real after twenty-five years of hysterical unreality. Con- 
sequentially* too, Waterloo meant the relaxation of the terrible 
war-tension which had held rigid both Europe and the civilized 
world. The victor-trampling of Napoleon's troops was heard on 
this side of the Atlantic ; and our second war with England 
(1812-1814) was, in great measure, both in origin and in pur- 
poseless conclusion, the result of that victor-trampling. 

After Waterloo (June 18, 1815) the war- weary world snapped 
tension and sank to rest; tho' perhaps the secret terror tremor 
was not utterly stilled until six years later (May 5, 1821) when 
Napoleon, Man of Destiny, lay dead at St. Helena. 

Youth may idolize Napoleon, age may condemn: but so long 
as human nature is what it is, we ordinary mortals — knowing 
the difficulties that attend success, eminence, excellence ; knowing 
the almost insuperable obstacles that bar the way to supremacy, 
be it cosmopolitan, national, provincial, municipal, or paro-^ 
chial — will ever regard with loving wonder the man who won 
excellence and world-wide supremacy. 

It has been said that a base man or a thoroughly selfish man 
cannot truly love or inspire love. Whom did Napoleon love? 
History answers Napoleon. Yet Napoleon certainly inspired love. 
Josephine, the army, the Old Guard devotedly loved Napoleon. 
In the song from the French ' ' To Napoleon ' ' beginning with the 

150 



WATERLOO 

line, "Must thou go, my glorious Chief", some ardent ad- 
mirer lamenting Napoleon's downfall and doom cries out: 

"My chief, my king, my friend, adieu! 

Never did I droop before; 
Never to my sovereign sue, 

As his foes I now implore: 
All I ask is to divide 

Every peril he must brave; 
Sharing by my hero's side 

His fall, his exile, and his grave." 

And elsewhere we read that at Napoleon's farewell "all wept, 
but particularly Savary, and a Polish officer, who had been 
exalted from the ranks by Bonaparte. He clung to his master's 
knees ; wrote a letter to Lord Keith, entreating permission to ac- 
company him, even in the most menial capacity, which could 
not be admitted." 

Too bad Nap didn't die with the Old Guard. At La Belle 
Alliance in the midst of that last square of his death-devoted 
friends and lovers Napoleon should have died. "The Guard 
dies, it does not surrender" replied that gallant band as they 
awaited the last terrible onslaughts of the victor-breathing 
troops and thus were they hewn down even to a man. And, 
while this slaughter of his Guard was going on, Napoleon, urged 
and aided by Marshal Soult, was galloping away from the field. 
Too bad Napoleon didn't die at Waterloo. 

Quatbe-Bras and Lignt. 

Hoping to strike a decisive blow at the Prussian forces under 
Blucher before they could effect a junction with Wellington's 
advancing army, Napoleon marched upon Ligny (June 16, 
1815 ) . He left Marshal Ney at Quatre-Bras with instructions to 
oppose the advance of the English army towards Ligny, and to 
fight if necessary. Ney, taking advantage of Wellington 's temp- 
orary absence, (he had ridden across to confer with Blucher 

151 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

and was then hastening back) resolved to attack the Anglo- 
Netherland forces under the Prince of Orange. He was re- 
pulsed ; nevertheless he succeeded in checking the advance of the 
army towards Ligny. 

In the meantime Napoleon had gained a victory over eighty 
thousand Prussian troops under Blucher, and they were even 
then in ignominious retreat towards Wavre. Napoleon ordered 
Marshall Grouchy to follow up the Prussians and to prevent 
them, at any cost, from joining forces with Wellington. Blucher 
had been wounded at Ligny and his army thoroughly demoral- 
ized: Grouchy, with an army of thirty thousand men, seemed 
more than a match for such an opponent; and doubtless. Na- 
poleon, when hastening away from Ligny to oppose his more 
formidable foe, felt sure that the Prussians and Blucher were 
happily eliminated from the conflict confronting him. 

But in that conference between Wellington and Blucher, it 
had been agreed upon that in case of defeat at Ligny, Blucher 
should retreat towards Wavre, and Wellington would withdraw 
towards Waterloo; so that they would still be in line of direct 
communication, and a union of forces might be effected. Well- 
ington and Blucher trusted each other implicitly, "Whether after 
victory or defeat, come to me at Waterloo," said Wellington. 
"I will come," answered Blucher grimly and — he came. 

The following day (June 17) a reinforcement under Biilow 
reached Blucher at Wavre; thus the loss sustained at Ligny 
was made good. At Grouchy 's approach the following morn- 
ing (June 18) Blucher resolved to sacrifice deliberately a regi- 
ment of seventeen thousand men in order to detain Grouchy and 
keep him from returning to Napoleon, while he (Blucher) and 
Billow with the bulk of the Prussian army should hasten to the 
aid of Wellington at Waterloo. 

Not at Wavre but at Waterloo was destiny at work; this 
Blucher knew and he acted accordingly: this Grouchy did not 

152 



WATERLOO 

know; and after completely routing with great slaughter the 
Prussians under Thielman, he kept up a meaningless pursuit fol- 
lowing a will-o-the-wisp, whilst Napoleon, after sending to him 
messenger after messenger urging his aid, stood still at last and 
deadly pale under the gorgeous June sunset, and saw all his 
hopes and dreams go down in darkness as the ominous moving 
cloud emerging from the direction of Wavre and advancing, 
glitteringly advancing, proved to be Blucher — not Grouchy. 

That deliberate leaving of seventeen thousand men as a bait 
in a trap for the victorious French forces thundering onward 
from Ligny is typical of the demon ingenuity of war. I have 
read somewhere that in darkest Africa the lure to the tiger trap 
is a kid securely fastened. Its fearful bleatings attract the 
night prowling brute: there is a spring: then awful shrieks 
arise growing shriller and shriller as the pangs of being de- 
voured alive grow tenser and more terrible: by this time the 
cannibals are upon the scene and the trap is sprung. 

Seventeen thousand soldiers as kid to the tiger lure — and 
men call themselves civilized! Could a woman do that? No; 
woman is higher in the moral scale than man. And the 
higher, thank God, is the kinder, tenderer, the more compassion- 
ate. Wars and all hellish machinations of cruelty must cease 
as the race, as a whole, advances into that higher. And ad- 
vancement, even tho ' zdgzag, shall ultimately attain to the higher 
and even to the highest. "We dream so. 

King Making Victory. 

Perhaps no other battlefield of the historic past has been 
more frequently described or rendered more vivid to mental 
vision than the field of Waterloo. Victor Hugo's masterly por- 
trayal in Les Miserahles is doubtless the best; but Sir Walter 
Scott, Lord Byron, Captain Siborne, and Napoleonic writers 

153 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

ad infinitum have added richness of tonal qualities to the 
monochrome. 

Those two long lines of undulating hills running nearly- 
parallel, with a valley half a mile in width between ; the allied 
army under Wellington on the northern ridge, the devoted 
French forces on the southern ; the artillery of each army firing 
incessantly upon the other over the heads of the combatants in 
the valley and on the lower slope ; the forest of Soignies darkly 
waving in the rear of Wellington's forces; the village and ra- 
vine at the right warding off a possible flank movement ; the two 
hamlets La Haye and Papillote at the left, strongly garrisoned 
of course and then, too, expectant of Blucher's approach from 
Wavre; Hougoumont, an old stone chateau surrounded by a 
copse of beech trees, half way down the slope nearly in front of 
the British right center — strongly fortified, most important, 
strategic ; Hougoumont — to be taken and retaken seven times 
during that day of destiny and held at last in flaming ruins 
by the British ; the farm house La Haie Sainte somewhat down 
from the British left center, heavily garrisoned, expectant of 
what came ; the French forces in superb battle array on the 
Charleroi crest of tlie hill, with an open way to France behind 
them and the hamlet La Belle Alliance, Napoleon's head- 
quarters, and their idol Napoleon — before : why every school boy 
knows the plan of this most famous battlefield! 

Had Napoleon's star not been fatally descendant he must 
have won at Waterloo. His forces, seventy-two thousand, were 
numerically stronger than the opposing forces seventy-one thou- 
sand eight hundred and five, under Wellington; then, too, his 
army was a unit and unanimously devoted to him, whereas 
Wellington's army was a mixup of Belgians, Dutch, Nassauers, 
Brunswickers, Hanoverians, with only twenty-four thousand 
English troops upon whom he could implicitly rely. Wellington 
knew and Napoleon knew that the Belgian and Netherland forces 

154 



WATERLOO 

would far rather be fighting under the French eagles than against 
them. And in truth these regiments did disgracefully run away 
from before the advancing French columns in the crisis of the 
strife, and the demoralizing effect of their flight was counter- 
acted only by the superhuman efforts and life-sacrificing de- 
votedness of England's two brave heroes Picton and Ponsonby. 

It is true that Wellington confidently awaited a strong 
Prussian reinforcement, eighty thousand — and Blucher. It is 
equally true that owing to heavy rainfall and consequently al- 
most impassable roads between Wavre and Waterloo, Blucher 
who was eagerly looked for at 3 p. m. did not reach the field 
until 7 p. m. and at that time the battle was practically won 
by the British. 

Had Napoleon's pristine favor been accorded him — the magic 
favor of fate that had made possible Areola, Rivoli, Jena, Ulmn, 
Wagram, Austerlitz — he would have defeated Wellington at 
Waterloo, advanced upon the advancing Prussians and com- 
pletely routed them ; and then he would have hastened to crush 
separately and before a junction could be effected the various 
contingencies of the Coaliton even then converging upon him 
by way of the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees. But fate 
forsook her favorite at Waterloo. Olympian Zeus, jealous of 
Promethean man, has decreed that if once, then certainly not 
twice, shall a mortal transcend the lot of mortals. 

It rained all night long that memorable seventeenth of June, 
the night before the battle. Of those forces that thus drearily 
bivouacked upon the opposing hills, some fifty thousand men 
thus passed their last night upon earth. Nature wept for them. 
The skies dissolved in tears at the mad folly of mortals. Rain, 
inconsolable rain, fell from the early afternoon of the seven- 
teenth, thro' all the night, and sobbingly drizzled late on the 
morning of the eighteenth as the armies went out to battle. 

That dreary last night of life for fifty thousand men — what 

155 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

did it mean to them! Did any flint-glitterings, struck out of 
sullen gloom, zigzag thro' the darkness of their minds? Why- 
should they fight? Why should they kill and be killed on the 
morrow? Wellington, Napoleon — what were they to the com- 
mon soldier; he would be free, he would go to his home, he 
would live his life as God gave it to him to live. Desert on the 
eve of battle ! Ah, no ! Yet, why not ? 

"So free we seem, so fettered fast we are." Honor bound 
tonight and death bound tomorrow night ! Who of those sleep- 
ing in yonder tents, under the rain, shall fall tomorrow ? Whom 
shall he kill? Who may kill— him? 

"Some one has blundered." 

* * « » 

"Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs but to do and die." 

Again, why? Half a million men must die because Napoleon 
blundered — Why! And the tears of the rain made answer. 

At half past eleven o'clock Sunday morning, June 18, shortly 
after the village church bells had ceased ringing, the French 
forces began descending the slope of the southern ridge and 
were soon dashing across the valley. Their first object was the 
capture of Hougoumont. In the words of Creasy: "Napoleon 
began the battle by directing a powerful force from his left 
wing under his brother, Prince Jerome, to attack Hougoumont. 
Column after column of the French now descended from the 
west of the southern heights, and assailed that post with fiery 
valor, which was encountered with the most determined bravery. 
The French won the copse round the house, but a party of 
British Guards held the house itself throughout the day. Amid 
shell and shot, and the blazing fragments of part of the build- 
ings, this obstinate contest was continued. But still the Eng- 
lish held Hougoumont, tho' the French occasionally moved for- 
ward in such numbers as enabled them to surround and mask 

156 



WATERLOO 

this post with part of their troops from their left wing, while 
others pressed onward up the slope, and assailed the British 
right." 

The fight then became general all along the line. As the 
French advanced to the left center the Dutch and Belgians 
under Blyant threw down their arms and fled from the field, 
whether as result of fright, disinclination to fight, or treachery 
will, perhaps, never be known. The second line consisted of 
two brigades of English infantry and with these the gallant 
Picton charged the advancing French columns already flushed 
with victory. Volley after volley thinned the advancing ranks 
and then, at the opportune moment, the British made a fierce 
bayonet charge. The French reeled back in confusion, halted, 
and staggering tried to rally, but just then a brigade of English 
Cavalry rushed down upon them. Two thousand French sol- 
diers were taken prisoners, the artillery-men of Ney's seventy- 
four advanced guns were sabered and the guns rendered useless. 
The British cut the throats of the horses of the artillery wagons, 
and severing the traces, left these poor brutes maddened with 
pain to add to the horror of the slaughter. In this charge 
Picton fell. 

At La Haie Sainte, the fortified farm house that served as 
protection of the British left wing, the French performed prodi- 
gies of valor. At last Donzelot's infantry gained possession of 
this long desired point of vantage. 

About 4 o'clock a corps of Prussians under Biilow made its 
appearance at the French right. This disconcerted Napoleon's 
plan of general assault on the allied center. He sent ten thou- 
sand men under Lobau to hold Biilow in check. 

In the meantime, Wellington ordered another assault to be 
made for the recapture of La Haie Sainte. Ney repelled this 
attack, but sent for reinforcements. Napoleon sent him the 
cuirassiers under Milhaud. By mistake the forces of light 

157 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

cavalry under Lefebvre-Desnouettes joined the eurassiers and 
hastened to the assistance of La Haie Sainte. Ney finding him- 
self in command of two powerful bodies of horse resolved to 
take the offensive; he accordingly renewed the attack upon the 
British center. Wellington had arranged his men in squares; 
these hedged in with bayonets presented an almost impenetrable 
front to the enemy. Still they showed signs of wavering; and 
Ney seeing his advantage sent hurriedly for a reinforcement of 
infantry; Napoleon could send no more. 

Lobau had succeeded in driving Biilow out of the village 
(Planchenoit) on the French right; La Haie Sainte was still 
in the possession of the French; and could Ney have obtained 
the infantry he desired, historians agree that he would have suc- 
ceeded in forcing the British center. That hour was the pivotal 
beam of the battle and it seemed about to dip in favor of France. 

Nap watched the scene from the opposite hill. How his 
heart must have thrilled to the air of old time victory ; "Wagram, 
Austerlitz, — Waterloo ! 

It was evening, the western sky was crimson with sunset, night 
must soon come and end the conflict. Wellington, too, was 
ardently longing that "the night would come or — Blucher." 

And just then on the ominous French right whence Biilow 's 
division had been routed an hour ago, another darkly moving 
mass of men appeared. Was it Grouchy — hope ! or Blucher — 
despair! It was Blucher. Napoleon turned deadly pale; he 
asked for a glass of water but in his agitation, he spilled more 
than half the contents ere his trembling hand could lift the 
glass to his lips. Thus bitterly began Napoleon 's Waterloo. 

Napoleon concentrated all his available forces, the reserve 
troops, and the Old Guard for one more Herculean attack upon 
the British. Across the plain they dashed, Ney leading the 
charge, and over their heads played the French artillery in an 
incessant rain of lead upon the opposing height. Men there 

158 



WATERLOO 

were falling under it like leaves in autumn. Wellington, observ- 
ing the havoc wrought by the French guns, ordered the British 
Guards to lie prone upon the earth so as to be out of range of 
the bullets. As the French approached the foot of the ridge, 
and even as they advanced up the slope, the fire from Napoleon 's 
headquarters continued, but when they had fairly gained the 
height, the French guns ceased firing. 

On rushed the devoted French columns led by Ney, bravest 
of the hrave, who- covered with blood and dust, hatless, with 
clothing torn, and on foot — five horses having been shot under 
him — still dared to dream of victory. As the French reached 
the top of the hill, for one madly exultant moment they thought 
that the enemy had fled; but at Wellington's hissing command, 
"Up, Guards, and at them!", they stood aghast as the very 
earth seemed to open and pour out brigade after brigade of 
British Red Coats. The onslaught was awful. Over the crest 
of the hill and far down the slope the French were driven saber- 
slaughtered and slaughtering. La Garde Reculee (The Guard is 
repulsed) — this cry with its ominous suggestion sped from 
blanched lip to lip. And soon the most desperate of all defeat 
cries Sauve qui peutl (All 's lost : save himself who can !) became 
general among the fleeing French forces. 

At La Belle Alliance Napoleon attempted to make a rallying 
point; he hastily pressed his few devoted followers into a 
square, declaring it his intention to perish with them. But as 
it is the surgeon that has most mercilessly used his knife upon 
others, who shrinks back in awful dread from the knife as used 
upon himself: so Napoleon who had seen thousands of soldiers 
die of bloody wounds, could not endure for himself that which 
he had been willing to witness in others. As the English drew 
near and, seeing the hopelessness of the French position, called 
upon them to surrender; and even as General Cambronne gal- 
lantly replied, "The Guard dies; it does not surrender", Na- 

159 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

poleon spurred back his horse, turned, and galloped at full 
speed from the field. 

Exile. 



Napoleon a second time signed a treaty of abdication just 
one hundred days after his flagrant violation of the first treaty 
of abdication. One hundred days of doubtful triumph and then 
— Waterloo : was it worth while ! 

The Macchievellian principles — honorable fraud; splendid 
rascality; a ruler should combine the qualities of the fox and 
the lion ; no matter what the means may be, the vulgar are ever 
caught by appearances and judge only by the event — which Na- 
poleon had so deeply imbibed from perusal of his favorite book 
II Principe, suffered sudden collapse of inflation and wraith- 
like glimmered as will-o-the' wisps in a bog. That stripping 
away of names and epithets and phrases and opinions and cus- 
toms and sunlight success from the — Lie : and that Lie in naked 
hideousness black-branded on the soul for self and all the world 
to see ; — how terrible a triumph of the unseen over the seen, 
the real over the apparent, the truth over the lie ! What Auster- 
litz concealed Waterloo revealed. Outlaw of Europe, execrable 
wretch, vile miscreant whom no promises or vows could hold in 
honor, etc., were among the uncouth Teutonic free translations of 
Nap's subtly soft II Principe. 

And Josephine was dead; she had died a year ago while 
Nap was at Elba. Josephine never knew the worst about Na- 
poleon; she never could have known the "execrable wretch" as 
the Congress of Vienna knew him. Love and hate see differently 
the same objects. As she would gladly have followed Nap to 
Elba, so, too, would she have been a pitying angel at his side 
in the world-execration after Waterloo, and in the bitter loneli- 
ness of St. Helena. Was Nap, the real, what he was as known 

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WATERLOO 

and loved by Josephine or what he was as seen and hated by 
the Congress of Vienna; or neither? 

That portrait of Napoleon by Delaroche comes to mind. We 
are sorry for Nap in his hour of ignominy; we forgive him all 
the sorrows that he caused — to others; we look with him fas- 
cinated into the fatal future, we grieve with the stoic grief of 
the Man of Destiny. 

Meissonier's companion pictures "1807: Friedland" and 
"1814: Retreat from Moscow" come to mind. Full success- 
sun convergent from Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram shines in "1807" ; 
penumbral shadows gray-flecked with snows from Borodino, 
Moscow, Berizina lower in "1814". 

Louis David's statuesque picture "Napoleon Crossing the 
Alps" comes to mind. It seems the "French Revolution on 
horse-back" yet controlled, goaded up the ascent, led out from 
bleeding France, and destiny-plunging on toM^ards Italy, 
Prussia, Austria, Russia. 

David's canvas "Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine '^ 
comes sadly to mind. From that rhapsody of color-splendor to 
bleak Helena surf-lashed by the sea; from that act of crowning 
exaltation to the signing of abdication at Fontainebleau ; from 
that supreme success in life to a failure-grave under the wil- 
lows : ah ! surely there throbs within and between these antithetic 
scenes all that enigmatic life may hold for us mortals. Noth- 
ing exists beyond — in pleasure or in pain, in honor or dis- 
honor, in success or failure, in highest or lowest. 

Cor ne edito (Eat not the Heart). 

Napoleon spent the last six years of life on the island St. 
Helena (Oct. 16, 1815 — May 5, 1821). There are various stories 
told as to his bitter loneliness whilst in exile, his ceaseless re- 
pining at fate, his chafing chagrin under the cautious coldness 

161 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

of Sir Hudson Lowe. Nap is most frequently represented walk- 
ing alone on the shore, his hands locked behind, his head lower- 
ed and his "broad brow oppressive with his mind" bent sul- 
lenly forward. Again as a caged eagle he stands for hours at 
a time on the rocky ledge looking out over the gray waste of 
waters with eyes straining towards France. And old ocean al- 
ways inimical to Napoleon and coldly conscious of Aboukir and 
Trafalgar enjoys indifferently its final triumph. True to Brit- 
tania. Ruler of the "Wave, the gray waters roll impenetrable to 
bribery or betrayal, impervious to sentiment or sympathy. Na- 
poleon, victor of a hundred fields, king-maker, arbiter of Europe, 
is caught and caged; his eagle wings all torn and bleeding yet 
dash against the bars ; he is eating his heart, restless sea, and 
he gazes on thee : old ocean rolled responseless. 

Am I tonight participant in the woe that had its hours of 
agony one hundred years ago? It seems so. 

Hero Worship. 

Balance is hard. And to see clearly all sides of a subject, 
however conducive to balance, is destructive of enthusiasm. 
Hero worship is, perhaps, a phase of hysteria, but without it 
there are no heroes. No name upon the historic page, from 
Homer's Achilles do^vn to Carlyle's Cromwell, but shines with 
luster luminous from hero worship. Alexander, Hannibal, 
Cffisar, Charlemagne, Napoleon — the world will ever love them, 
not perhaps for what they were, but for the vision splendid 
with which they are attended, and which was formed and fitted 
to them by admiring love. 

Retrospect. 

As Nap paced sleeplessly his rock kingdom under the flaky 
stars, did memory ever conjure up a strange night scene in old 
Vincennes? The young Due d' Enghein, last of the race of the 

162 



WATERLOO 

great Conde, was asleep iu bed. Suddenly, by order of the First 
Consul, the French soldiery aroused the sleeper, dragged him 
from his luxurious couch, hurried him across the French frontier, 
tried him by a military commission, and then, in a ditch of the 
castle grounds, that very night, by order of the First Consul, 
they shot to death the gay young man. And they tied a lantern 
to his breast that it might serve as target to his heart. Did 
Nap see that night scene from under the flaky stars of St. 
Helena ? His Memoir es do not so record. 

Did the treacherously yielding waves that lapped his island 
home ever suggest to Nap that horror scene, when after Auster. 
litz, as the fleeing enemy were escaping over the frozen lake, 
the French artillery, by order of the Emperor, played heavily 
upon the ice ; it cracked, broke, crashed down, and thousands 
sank within the treacherous waves. Or did they softly sigh of 
Berezina, when the heavily laden bridge broke down and his 
own devoted soldiers and friends — those who had stood by him 
at Borodiuo, in Moscow, and in the dread Retreat — struggled 
in the icy waters? Nap's Memoires do not so record. 

And the dark rolling billows surf-capped — did they at times 
suggest low mounds in churchyards, or ominous ridges on recent 
battle grounds? Half a million men had died that Nap might 
rise and — fall. All Europe, from Lisbon to Moscow was dotted 
with their graves. Surely in the retrospective leisure of exile, 
however it may have been in the fever of the empire-strife, 
there was regret for all the young life suddenly darkened into 
death; there was awakening self-knowledge regretful, remorse- 
ful; there was lamentation at the futility of it all, the horror, 
the agony, the shame ; there was prayer, the bitter prayer of 
Thais of the Desert, "Thou who hast made me have mercy 
on me ! " Maybe : not ours to know the enigmatic heart of man ; 
we only say there is no record of such feelings in Nap 's memoirs. 

Did the year 1809 loom sullen in retrospect? That year held 

163 



BATTLES OF D'ESTINY 

iu record the capture of Pope Pius VII. and his confinement at 
Savona; the ban of excommunication pronounced against Na- 
poleon by his illustrious prisoner; and Nap's divorce from 
Josephine. 

The Emperor was at this time at the height of his career. 
He was drunk with power. In his hand as playthings were 
the kingdoms of Europe, and he awarded them as whim or 
pleasure urged. To his brother Joseph, too scrupulous to be 
great, Nap condescendingly gave the throne of Spain; to his 
brother Louis, Holland ; to his brother Jerome, Westphalia ; to a 
favorite general, Bernadotte, Sweden ; to Murat, Naples. At his 
touch, the Holy Roman Empire — no longer, indeed, either holy 
or Roman or an empire — had crumbled into dust. Germany 
lay prostrate; Austria humbled; Russia chastened, yet friendly. 
Only England' secure in her watery kingdom, dared to oppose 
his plans and resist his power. 

And then this madman on the dizzy height dreamed a glor- 
ious dream. The Pontiff, Pius VII., prisoner at Savona, would 
annul the marriage with Josephine; then he would marry the 
sister of the Tsar of Russia; then with the help of Russia he 
would conquer India and "so strike England to the heart." 
After that ' ' it will be possible to settle everything and have done 
with this business of Rome and the Pope. The cathedral of 
Paris will become that of the Catholic world." And Napoleon 
shall be all in all. Perhaps, too, this rhapsody ended half 
audibly with the adulatory words of the prefect of Arras, ' ' God 
created Napoleon and then rested from His works." 

But as seen from gray Helena, the Pope did not annul the 
marriage with Josephine, nor did Nap marry the sister of 
Tsar Alexander or long retain the friendship of Russia ; nor did 
he conquer India and so strike England to the heart; nor did 
he ever have done with that business of Rome and the Pope. 

164 



WATERLOO 

That "business" has seen the rise and fall of many — and yet 
shall see. 

Was Napoleon a Catholic? He died in the bosom of the 
Catholic church after having devoutly received the sacraments. 
To General Montholon he said : "I was born in the Catholic 
religion ; I wish to fulfil the duties it imposes and to receive 
the succors it administers." On another occasion he said, "It 
would rest my soul to hear Mass." These words having been 
reported to the Pontill^, Pope Pius VII., one time prisoner at 
Savona, the gentle old man immediately petitioned the Eng- 
lish government to send a priest to minister to the spiritual 
wants of Napoleon. In compliance with the papal request the 
Abbe Vignali was sent to St. Helena. 

Napoleon in his Memoires> speaking of Pius VII., calls him 
' ' an old man full of tolerance and light ' ' ; and in euphemistic 
reference to his troubles with the pontiff he writes, "Fatal 
circumstances embroiled our cabinets; I regret it exceedingly." 

But whatever Nap may have been in exile at St Helena, 
certainly in 1809-10, as arbiter of Europe, he was an arch 
enemy to the Catholic church, and he acted in flagrant viola- 
tion of all that the Church stands for. And had his phenomenal 
success continued to favor him, he would, without doubt, have 
lived and died an enemy to the Church. 

Napoleon never ceased to be a deist. "Who made all that, 
Gentlemen ? " he said one night as he and his friends were gaz- 
ing at the starry heavens. As a statesman he perceived that re- 
ligion is an ally to good government, and doubtless he was 
sincere when he said, "A society without religion is like a ship 
without a compass; there is no good morality without religion." 
Nap's reestablishment of the Church in France after the Revo- 
lution, and the Concordat made in the beginning of his reign ; the 
six years spent at St. Helena and his death there, would seem to 
testify -that Napoleon was at deepest heart a sincere child of 

165 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

that Church so tolerant of hiiinan frailty and so divinely com- 
passionate towards those who come contritely back from er- 
ror's devious ways and would sleep the last sleep in her bosom. 

Let Wars Cease. 

"The drying up a single tear has more 
Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore. 
And why? because it brings self approbation: 
Whereas the other, after all its glare, 
Shouts, bridges, arches, pensions from a nation, 
Which (it mny be) has not much left to spare, 
A higher title or a loftier station, 
Tho' they may make Corruption gape or stare. 
Yet in the end, except in Freedom's battles — 
Are nothing but a child of Murder's rattles." — Byron. 

The rattles of this preeminent child of Murder were heard 
in deafening clatter over all Europe for twenty years; there is 
a singular dearth of the acts that have honest fame or that 
conduce to self-approbation. A steely selfishness from first to 
last marks the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. 

Nearly a hundred years have passed away since Nap's dread 
Waterloo. There have been wars since then and much blood 
has flowed, tho' perhaps of no one battle since Waterloo may it 
decisively be said that had victory gone other than it did go, 
all subsequent history would be essentially different from what it 
is. 

Perhaps in our Civil War the three days' battle of Gettys- 
burg may seem to hold a determinant place. The continuance 
of slavery and the break up of the young Republic of the West 
would surely have made a momentous page of history — but one 
with which w^e are happily unfamiliar. Nor would the import of 
that page affect only us and our Republic; both continents are 
now more or less favorably influenced by what we now are, so 
may they have been unfavorably influenced by what we might 
have been. But Gettysburg is too near for perfect vision. Then, 

166 



WATERLOO 

too, the personal element, favorable or unfavorable, is con- 
ducive to myopia. So with Waterloo, secure in a hundred years' 
perspective, the Battle:^ of Destiny end. 

In a hasty glance over the historic field from Memphis, 
50^0 B. C. to Mexico, 1914 A. D. — the great conflicts of na- 
tions loom sullenly as blood red peaks daubing the darkness. 
There is no sequence; they lead nowhere; they just sullenly, 
luridly bleed. Memphis ; Nineveh ; Babylon ; Marathon, Salamis, 
Syracuse, iEgospotami. Leuctra, Mantinea, Chaeronea; Granicus, 
Issus, Arbela; Ipsus; Cannae, Zama, Cynoscephalffi, Magnesia, 
Pharsalia, Philippi, Actium; Teutobergerwald ; Chalons; Tours; 
Hastings; Orleans; Lepanto; Blenheim; Naseby; Pultova; Sara- 
toga; Valmy; Waterloo; Gettysburg; Mukden; Adrianople; 
Mexico — as blood red peaks dot the darkness. Is warfare and 
concomitant hate the natural state of man? The peaks ooze 
blood in answer. 

Some pessimistic glimmerings of the Epicurean philosophy 
seem to scintillate out from the past. And that philosophy, 
crystallized in Lucretius' cynic saying. Homo homini lupus (One 
man is a wolf to another man) glitters in icicle harshness and 
coldness down in the darkness. And yet amidst this general 
censure of the heart of man I hear a shrill true cry of self 
excu^lpation. I am not a wolf to man or beast or bird. My 
hands are clean; my heart is kind. Am I unique in the hu- 
man nature plan? No. May I affirm of self that which I deny 
of others? No. My own light illumines the darkness and 
leads upward and on. 

Cease Firing, Lay Down Your Arms, "We speak for those 
(dumb animals) who cannot speak for themselves"; "I would 
not enter on my list of friends the man who needlessly sets foot 
upon a worm " ; " He who is not actively kind is cruel ' ' — are 
among the utterances of the hour that tip the farthest pendu- 
lum-swing from old Lucretius' snarl. Wars must cease. The 

167 



BATTLES OF DESTINY 

searchlight of civilization's best thought and feelings is turned 
full upon war — showing its hitherto darkly concealed causes; 
its concomitant wrongs, sufferings, shamble horrors; its calami- 
tous, nation-suicidal results. However necessary or inevitable 
the arbitrament by the sword may have been in the past, it is 
so no longer. 

Let wars cease : in the name of all the bloody battlefields from 
Marathon to Waterloo; and in pity for all the war- woe from 
Egypt's Memphis down to Mexico — let wars cease. 



168 



I Ucj f^ 



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